After all, obesity help can come in a pill, according to a new study involving a treatment for diabetes that has led to noticeable weight loss for the average participant.
“A medical treatment for obesity that leads to weight loss of 10% in most and weight loss of 20% in more than a third of the participants. This is the beginning of a new era, ”said Rachel Batterham, one of the researchers involved in the study and a professor of obesity, diabetes and endocrinology and head of the UCL Obesity Research Center and the UCLH Weight Control Center, in Twitter
TWTR,
According to the study that was published in The New England Journal of Medicine on Wednesday,
The subjects received an injection of semagglutide under the skin or a placebo weekly, along with counseling sessions to adhere to a reduced calorie diet and increased exercise. Semagglutide is sold under the names Ozempic and Rybelsus by the Danish pharmaceutical company Novo Nordisk NVO,
“Participants who received semagglutide were more likely to lose 5% or more, 10% or more, 15% or more and 20% or more of baseline body weight at week 68 than those who received placebo,” said the study.
Trial participants were 18 years or older, with one or more previous dietary attempts to lose weight and with a body mass index (BMI) of 30 or more, or a BMI of 27 with one or more weight-related illnesses, treated or not . A normal BMI tends to fall in the range of 18.5 to 24.9.
“Our trial showed that among overweight or obese adults (without diabetes), subcutaneous semagglutide once a week plus lifestyle intervention was associated with a substantial, sustained and clinically relevant average weight loss of 14.9%, with 86 % of participants achieving at least 5% weight loss ”, said the study researchers.
Novo Nordisk presented semagglutide as a weight control treatment for regulatory approval by the Food and Drug Administration and the European Medicines Agency.