There are many excellent life saving and life improving medications out there, drugs that save lives and dramatically improve quality of life. I have many people in my life where drugs have saved their lives.
Then there are diet drugs. No diet drug has ever worked in the long run and some of them have been proved to be deadly.
This new drug lorcaserin seems like it is the same shit different day. The most important point is that it sucks as weight loss drug. 3,200 fat people were randomly given the drug or placebo for a whole year. After the year 55% of the placebo and 45% of those given the drugs dropped out, either because it wasn't working or of they couldn't take the side effects.
The average weight loss during the first year was about 12 pounds in the lorcaserin group and 5 pounds in the placebo group. During the second year of the study, 68% of people who continued to take the weight loss drug maintained the loss vs. 50% of people switched to placebo.
So your average weight loss is about a pound a month. Congratulations, if you weighed 300 pounds before the study, you now weight 288 which by the way will not end the stigma against you in the doctor's office, the job, the gym, the health insurance companies and you aren't thin.
The second issue of course is the side effects.
The same safety signals– in particular, lingering concerns about heart valve problems– remain. It is unclear whether new, previously unpublicized data submitted by Arena on the effect of lorcaserin on the serotonin receptor (the source of previous heart valve problems with phen/fen) will move the dial on this issue. One important note of caution here: although no statistically significant increase in risk of valve disease was found by the FDA (relative risk 1.16, 95% CI 0.81-1.67), the reviewer noted that the “upper bound exceeds the 1.5 upper bound requested by FDA to rule out an excess risk of VHD.”
What essentially you have here is diet drug that barely works that works on the serotonin receptor the same as phen/fen . In case you don't remember what phen/fen did, here is a description of PPH
Primary pulmonary hypertension has no cure. If left untreated, the right side of the heart becomes overworked and eventually fails, leading to death. One study showed that 30% of untreated PPH patients died within 3 years of diagnosis.
So why would Arena Pharmaceuticals push a diet drug that doesn't work and has potientially deadly side effects?
Why? Because of the money that's why. With an FDA advisory panel saying a-okay on approving it, stocks in Arena have gone up about 12 percent.
Now I hope those who bought stocks in Arena know when to sell. Because my crystal balls sees another fen-phen disaster if this drug is approved.
Just for the sake of complete accuracy, there is, in fact, a drug that's known to suppress appetite and result in weight loss. It's completely reliable and has been studied over many years. The only trouble is, you have to keep taking it, and if you stop your weight will explode. It's called nicotine.
Posted by: Janet | June 19, 2012 at 11:46 AM
FAT CHICKS ARE HERE TO STAY (.)(.)
Posted by: AMELIA ARMOUR | July 08, 2012 at 10:41 PM