United States: The popular and new anti-obesity medication Zepbound can shield the grossly overweight population from getting type 2 diabetes, as a recently published clinical trial has demonstrated.
More about the finding
The attainment of weight loss through Zepbound lowered the incidences of diabetes in obese, prediabetic patients by more than 90 percent over a three-year period as compared with a placebo, the trial showed.
According to Dr. Louis Aronne, the researcher and director of the Comprehensive Weight Control Center at Weill Cornell Medicine in New York City, “These results show that type 2 diabetes may be prevented, even in people who are on the verge of it, by using a medicine that causes weight loss,” US News reported.
Know about Prediabetes
Prediabetes is a condition in which a person’s blood glucose level is higher than normal but has not reached the level of type 2 diabetes.
Overweight is a common comorbidity in prediabetes and one of the strongest modifiable risk factors for subsequent type 2 diabetes development.
In this double-blind clinical trial, over 2,500 overweight patients were evaluated for over three years, randomly dividing them into a low-dose group, a medium-dose group, a high-dose group, and a placebo group to take Zepbound. Out of them, over 1000 patients had prediabetic status.
For this clinical trial, more than 2,500 obese people were randomly assigned to receive one of three different doses of Zepbound, or a placebo, for more than three years. Of those patients, more than 1,000 had prediabetes.
Zepbound (tirzepatide) is an injectable drug that acts on glucagon-like peptide one or GLP-1 receptor and glucose-dependent insulinotropic peptide or GIP receptor in the body; the researchers pointed out.
These receptors also allow diabetic patients to slow digestion, reduce appetite, and regulate their blood sugar levels.
It is a fact that a family of drugs known as GLP-1 induces substantial weight loss, US News reported.
As for the side effects, in this trial, patients receiving Zepbound shed between 12 percent and 20 percent of their starting weight after the final three years of the drug, and the amount of weight loss increased with the dosage.
In turn, those in the placebo group shed a little over one percent of their weight on average.
More benefits of medicine
The drug also enabled patients to avoid diabetes in the trial. The Zepbound-treated obese prediabetic patients‘ incidence rate was 1 percent for the development of type 2 diabetes, which was significantly lower than placebo, at 13 percent.
From these, Aronne said, Zepbound could be the first possible treatment for prediabetes registered in the market.
Additionally, “Think about the impact these types of weight-loss drugs can have in preventing not only diabetes but also many other common diabetes-related complications such as heart disease, liver and kidney disease, sleep apnea, arthritis, and more,” Arrone mentioned.