Hormone-based drugs may help in reducing weight: Study

A team of researchers has recently revealed that a unique combination of hormone-based drugs can produce enhanced weight loss.

Senior author Dr. Matthew Hayes from the University of Pennsylvania in the US said that imagine a drug regimen, where an obese person would cycle between different drug therapies over the course of a month to achieve a greater degree of body weight loss compared to the effects achieved with either a single drug or the continuous combination of drugs.

His team studied the combination of two different drug classes that target different hormones: amylin and glucagon-like peptide-1 (GLP-1).

They found that the combined treatments acted synergistically to suppress feeding and body weight.

They also discovered that the weight-loss effects of chronic amylin- and GLP-1-based combination therapies could be enhanced, when obese lab animals are cycled through their drug treatments.

Lead author Kieran Koch-Laskowski said that the idea of drug-cycling is nothing new.

Koch-Laskowski stated that millions of women on birth control pills, for example, already take daily pills that cycle between drug and placebo throughout the month.

The research has found that these enhanced weight-loss effects with a combination of drugs that are either already FDA approved or in clinical trials for metabolic diseases.

The research is scheduled to be presented at the Annual Meeting of the Society.

-ANI