When taken daily at a dose of 3 mg in combination with diet and exercise, liraglutide increased weight loss in overweight and obese nondiabetic adults, report Dr. Xavier Pi-Sunyer and coauthors from the Division of Endocrinology and Obesity Research Center at Columbia University in New York.
In a 56-week, double-blind trial of 3,731 overweight adults, patients who received liraglutide lost a mean of 8.4 ± 7.3 kg, compared with 2.8 ± 6.5 kg in the placebo group (a difference of –5.6 kg; 95% CI, –6.0 to –5.1; P < .001).
Additionally, 63.2% of participants in the liraglutide group lost at least 5% of their body weight, compared with 27.1% in the placebo group (P < .001). Furthermore, 33.1% of patients in the liraglutide group and 10.6% of patients in the placebo group lost more than 10% of their body weight (P < .001), the investigators found.
“Given previous disappointments with various weight-loss strategies, these are welcome findings,” said Dr. Elias S. Siraj and Dr. Kevin Jon Williams, of the Temple University, Philadelphia, in an accompanying editorial. Though the authors cautioned that “liraglutide is no cure,” the findings suggest that modest weight loss may now be easier to achieve, they concluded.
Read the full article here: http://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMoa1411892 and the editorial here: http://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMe1506236
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