When your wellness is affected by type 2 diabetes, you may be prescribed Byetta. This drug has been approved to cure diabetes, but a study has now found that it can also improve the wellbeing of obese teenagers, by helping them to shed off extra pounds.
Byetta (Exenatide) was approved by the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) in 2005. It is a medicine that you use to treat type 2 diabetes by injecting it into your body. The drug then helps your pancreas to produce insulin more efficiently, which helps you to control the level of your blood sugar.
Yet, according to Aaron Kelly, the study’s lead author from the University of Minnesota Medical School in Minneapolis, blood sugar control is now not the only benefit of using Byetta injections. ‘We’re encouraged by these trial results because there is potentially a role for this class (of drugs) to be useful in terms of weight reduction and cardiovascular risk control,’ he was quoted as saying in Reuters.
For the study, the team of researchers from Amplatz Children’s Hospital selected 32 obese children from Minnesota, between the ages of 12 and 19. They were divided into two different groups. The first group, consisting of 12 obese teenagers, were told to inject themselves with Byetta before breakfast and dinner every day for three months, and the remaining 10 obese kids were injected with an inactive placebo.
The results, which were published in the journal JAMA Paediatrics, were that, after six months, the obese youngsters who had taken the drug had a 4% reduction in their body mass index (BMI) compared to the group of teens that had taken the placebo. At the beginning of the study, the average BMI of the children was 43, but this dropped to 41 after just three months of taking Byetta in the first group. For those on placebo, their BMI was 42 at this juncture.
Kelly concluded by saying that, ‘We’re really viewing this as preliminary evidence for this general drug class. We wouldn’t recommend this medication to be used (for weight loss in youths) at this point.’
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