Obesity drug claimed to help people lose weight without exercise

Mon, 16 Jan 2012
A new drug that has been developed to combat obesity could offer the benefits of taking regular exercise but without the need to exert yourself, and which could be used to improve the treatment for patients with any condition that benefits from exercise.

A team from Harvard Medical School in the United States have produced a pill containing the hormone irisin that is naturally found in muscle cells, and which can trigger the calorie-burning from exercise, and that could help fight obesity. The study, published in Nature, showed that levels of irisin increase in the body when you take exercise, raising energy expenditure and managing the amount of blood glucose in the body.

Although the report recommended that the people should not use the pill as an alternative for exercise, the drug was found to help produce so-called healthy brown fat which is able to burn off weight but mostly disappears as we get older, to be replaced by bad white fat that usually stays around the waist as we age. It also seen to improve the resistance to obesity linked diabetes.

Research leader, Bruce Spiegelman, "Whether longer treatments with irisin and/or higher doses would cause more weight loss remains to be determined."

He added "The worldwide, explosive increase in obesity and diabetes renders attractive the therapeutic potential of irisin in these and related disorders."

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