Two New Drugs May Help In Fight Against Obesity

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Doctors may recommend that obese patients use weight-loss drugs to trick their hunger pangs.

Doctors may recommend that obese patients use weight-loss drugs to trick their hunger pangs.

The Food and Drug Administration approved two new medications this year to help obese and overweight individuals lose weight.

Diet drugs have been around in different forms for a while, but now researchers hope one of these two might actually help make a dent in the obesity epidemic.

Both of the drugs Belviq and Qsymia were approved in July. Belviq works in a similar way to the fen-phen appetite-suppression drug combination that was pulled from the market in 1997 because of a link to fatal heart valve problems. The new drug, at a lower dose, has been shown to be safe.

"Belviq was developed specifically to avoid the receptor on the heart valve which had been associated with heart damage, and there's no evidence in our research that heart valve problems will develop," says Dr. Donna Ryan, a researcher and obesity specialist at the Pennington Biomedical Research Center, which conducted studies of the two medications for the drug makers.

Qsymia is a time-released combination of two older medications: topiramate, an anti-seizure medicine, and phentermine, a stimulant. It is more powerful than Belviq but works in a similar way to stave off the body's "starvation response" to weight loss. Most of us who have tried to lose weight are familiar with that: Hormones are released to stimulate appetite, and metabolism slows down in order to conserve energy, adding up to an unfortunate recipe for regaining weight.

Dr. Judith Korner, an obesity specialist at New York's Columbia University Medical Center, says her patients know this well.

"I have one patient who came in and said he's lost the weight of a Volkswagen during his lifetime," she says. "It's like 2,000 pounds; he's lost 100 pounds and gained it back, and lost and regained."

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Two New Drugs May Help In Fight Against Obesity