A Weight Loss Journey

Here’s something interesting, as reported by By Maggie Fox, Health and Science Editor, Reuters

Researchers searching for a cure for obesity said on Thursday they have developed a drug that not only makes mice lose weight, but reverses diabetes and lowers their cholesterol, too.

The drug, which they have dubbed fatostatin, stops the body from making fat, instead releasing the energy from food. They hope it may lead to a pill that would fight obesity, diabetes and cholesterol, all at once.

Writing in the journal Chemistry and Biology, Salih Wakil of Baylor College of Medicine in Texas, Motonari Uesugi of Kyoto University in Japan and colleagues said the drug interferes with a suite of genes turned on by overeating.

“Here, we are tackling the basics,” Wakil said in a telephone interview. “I think that is what excited us.”

Scientists are painfully aware that drugs that can make mice thin do nothing of the sort in humans. A hormone called leptin can make rats and mice drop weight almost miraculously but does little or nothing for an obese person, for instance.

But Wakil, whose team has patented the drug and is looking for a drug company to partner with, hopes this drug may be different. “I am very, very optimistic,” he said.

Fatostatin is a small molecule, meaning it has the potential to be absorbed in pill form.

It works on so-called sterol regulatory element binding proteins or SREBPs, which are transcription factors that activate genes involved in making cholesterol and fatty acids.

“Fatostatin blocked increases in body weight, blood glucose, and hepatic (liver) fat accumulation in (genetically) obese mice, even under uncontrolled food intake,” the researchers wrote.

Genetic tests showed the drug affected 63 different genes.

The idea of interfering with SREBP is not new. GlaxSmithKline has been working on a new-generation cholesterol drug that uses this pathway.

After four weeks, mice injected with fatostatin weighed 12 percent less and had 70 percent lower blood sugar levels, the researchers wrote.

Now they plan to test rats and rabbits, Wakil said.

The drug also had effects on prostate cancer cells they said — something that may help explain links between prostate cancer and obesity.

Bio-Enterics Intra-Gastric balloon

According to CBS in New York, a  weight loss method that was popular approximately 30 years ago has recently been re-designed.

Dr. Anita Courcoulas wants her patients to live a healthy, happy life, and one way to do so is to maintain a healthy weight. Courcoulas is directing a year-long clinical study on the Bio-Enterics Intra-Gastric balloon, which is being used successfully to combat obesity in Europe and Asia. The gastric balloon promises all the effects of weight loss surgery without the surgery or drugs.

“This procedure is not an operation,” Courcoulas said. “It’s about a 10-to-20-minute procedure.”

A patient undergoing the treatment is sedated before a soft, expendable balloon and placement tube are lowered down the person’s stomach by way of the esophagus. The balloon is then filled with sterile saline solution before the tube is removed. It seals itself and remains in the patient’s stomach.

Drew Griffin, 45, was one of Courcoulas’s first patients to submit to the procedure. He entered the study weighing 230 pounds, and has since trimmed down to 204. “To drop that weight so fast was cool,” Griffin said. Griffin said his rate of weight loss since the procedure has gradually slowed over time. But he no longer deals with hunger pangs throughout the day, and claims to always feel full at meal times.

He has also found some additional benefits. “I sleep all the way through the night,” Griffin said. “I used to get up and raid the refrigerator. I am sleeping so well and I know it’s because of this.”

Courcoulas said Griffin’s balloon will be removed in November, after a total six months – by which time he hopes to have reached his ideal weight. “In four more months I should be down to about 185,” Griffin said. “I haven’t been 185, probably, since 8th grade.”

Although the gastric balloon holds great promise as a weight loss technique, it is not proven to work on its own.  Appropriate dieting, exercise and lifestyle practices must accompany any surgical procedure as, without them, it will not be effective in the long term.

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There’s quite a bit of discussion on the web about this.  As the above article states, most of the patients seem to be from outside the US.  Several report good results early on, then a slow down to their weight loss.  Some talk about how they are becoming “used to” the balloon, and are not enjoying the reduced hunger and/or desire to eat larger portions than they were immediately following the procedure.  Some complain of constant nausea.







For more information, contact Dr. Anita Pauline Courcoulas, MD at the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center by calling 1-800-533-8762 or 412-641-3632.  Here’s some info about the doc.