According to Aaron Kelly, the study’s lead author from the University of Minnesota Medical School in Minneapolis, ‘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.’ The drug was originally approved for use in 2005 by the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) to boost production of the hormone insulin in adults with type 2 diabetes, because when you have this disease, your body cannot produce enough of the hormone naturally, or it is resistant to it.
The drug also had the effect of reducing body weight, and the team wanted to see if this could be true for young people, as there are currently few treatments available for severely obese children outside of lifestyle changes and surgery. Kelly and his team separated 24 severely obese participants, between 12 and 19 years old, into two groups, one of which injecting themselves with exenatide before breakfast and dinner every day for three months, and the other injecting themselves with an inactive placebo.
The results, which were published in JAMA Paediatrics, were that the BMI of the first group fell, on average, to 41 from 43, whilst the placebo group ended up with an average BMI of 42. This means that the group taking exenatide lost about 7 pounds more than the placebo group. After this, the researchers gave exenatide to all of the participants for another three months, and though everyone lost weight, the group that started out taking the drug ended up with a 4% lower BMI than those who started out taking the placebo.
According to Dr. Ronald Williams, head of the Penn State Hershey Children’s Hospital Weight Management Program in Hershey, Pennsylvania, these results seem modest, but could really stack up over a few years: ‘If that is a sustained effect over a few years, that’s great,’ but as exenatide is not yet approved for use in children, and can cause headaches, diarrhoea and vomiting, both Williams and Kelly said you should not expect to get the drug for teen weight loss any time soon. Kelly concluded, ‘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.’