EFN

There is new hope on the horizon for an old failed hormone treatment for obesity. A new study was published this week in the journal Cell Metabolism that shows the natural hormone Leptin, first discovered in 1994, when combined with two FDA-approved drugs, may be able to help overweight people lose weight by keeping them from eating too much.

Leptin is a hormone that helps suppress the appetites of people, and showed great promise in human weight loss trials over ten years ago. It was discovered, however, that obese people became resistant to the hormone after a short period of time, therefore making it ineffective. Researchers, led by Dr. Umut Ozcan of Children’s Hospital Boston and the Harvard Medical School may have found a way around the resistance. They have found that two current FDA approved drugs, Phenyl Butyric Acid (PBA), which is a treatment for cystic fibrosis, and Tauroursodeoxycholic acid (TUDCA), which is a liver-disease treatment, when combined with Leptin may be able to prevent the body from building up a resistance.

The drugs have been shown effective in laboratory mice. When overweight mice were given Leptin injections along with PBA or TUDCA, they lost on average 16 percent of their body weight within 30 days. The next step is human trials, and researchers are very hopeful that they will begin soon.