Experimental Diet Pill Contrave Brought A Small Weight Loss

Experimental Diet Pill Contrave Brought A Small Weight Loss.
Contrave, an experiential moment loss drug that combines an antidepressant with an anti-addiction medication, appears to assistant users shed pounds when taken along with a healthy diet and exercise, researchers report. People who took the numb for more than a year lost an average of 5 percent or more of body weight, depending on the dosage used, the team said. However, the regimen did come with side effects, and about half of weigh participants dropped out before completing a year of treatment.

Contrave is combination of two well-known drugs, naltrexone (Revia, cast-off to fight addictions) and the antidepressant bupropion (known by a number of names, including Wellbutrin). The drug, which is up for US Food and Drug Administration re-examination this December, appears to increase weight loss by changing the workings of the body's central nervous system, the researchers report.

The researchers, who write-up their findings online July 29, 2010 in The Lancet, enrolled men (15 percent) and women (85 percent) from around the country, ranging in length of existence from 18 to 65. They were all either pot-bellied or overweight with high blood fat levels or spacy blood pressure. The participants were told to eat less and exercise, and they were randomly assigned to gobble up a twice-daily placebo or a combination of the two drugs with naltrexone at one of two levels.

After 56 weeks, only about half (870) of the more than 1700 participants initially enrolled remained in the study. Almost half (48 percent) of those who took the highest quantity of naltrexone distracted 5 percent of their cross or more, while only 16 percent of those who took placebos did. However, about 30 percent of those taking Contrave trained nausea, the study authors say, and other side effects included headache, constipation, dizziness, vomiting and bare mouth.

Still, Contrave may give people struggling to lose weight a uncharted option, the researchers contend. "Although lifestyle modification is first-line therapy for obesity, adherence to this intervention is poor," they write. "The syndicate of naltrexone plus bupropion could be a useful ell to the current range of medications that facilitate adherence to lifestyle modification and produce clinically serious weight loss for treatment of obesity and obesity-related disorders".

The findings reflect the results of studies into other drugs, such as the fare drugs Meridia, Xenical and Alli, said Lona Sandon, an helpmate professor of clinical nutrition at the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center in Dallas and spokeswoman for the American Dietetic Association. "When these are combined with a modestly reduced calorie diet, unassuming amounts of mass loss are achieved. One striking thing to note is the study drop-out compute of 50 percent. This may have been due to side effects of medications, the fact that it is hard to stick to dietary changes for 56 weeks, or the reality that slow and only modest weight loss did not meet sharer expectations".

Cynthia Sass, a New York City-based nutritionist and author, added that drugs worn to treat addiction also appear to help with weight control, supporting "the notion that food can be addictive for many people". The authors eminent that additional studies are needed before putting this regimen into practice. One task is that blood pressure did not drop as much as expected in the higher weight-loss group, an accompanying leader notes found it. "More data are needed to get a better overall assessment of cardiovascular risk of this otherwise promising union therapy for obesity," wrote Professor Arne Astrup, a nutrition expert at the University of Copenhagen, Denmark.