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Rimonabant -very good news

Rimonabant- a
single drug for weight loss, smoking cessation, dyslipidemia, and metabolic
syndrome sounds almost too good to be true, but two clinical trials
presented at the American College of Cardiology

. The first in a new class of drug, Rimonabant is a cannaboid receptor
1 (CB1) antagonist that appears to be taking meeting attendees by surprise.

“Results of this trial
indicate that physicians may finally have a new tool to treat common,
classic complications that are major risk factors for cardiovascular
disease but that are too often treated in isolation, such as hypertension,
dyslipidemia, and type 2 diabetes,”

“Rimonabant
may be helpful in targeting the cause of those clustering abnormalitiesfor
example, abdominal obesityhopefully improving our ability to better
manage cardiovascular risk in an expanding proportion of our patients.”

“At a time when an estimated
50 million people may be affected by metabolic syndrome, this is good
news,” Dr Sidney Smith (University of North Carolina, Chapel
Hill) told heartwire.

Risk-factor improvement
in Rimonabant-treated patients

A
full 44% of subjects taking rimonabant for one year lost more than 20%
of their body weight, compared with only 16.3% of those taking 5-mg
rimonabant and 10.3% of placebo-treated subjects. The number of patients
with metabolic syndrome at study onset dropped by more than 50% in the
20-mg patients.

A help for those who want to
quit smoking :after 10 weeks of treatment, including a two-week run-in
period when they were allowed to continue to smoke and a final four-week
period when smoking abstinence was assessed, smokers randomized to 20
mg of rimonabant were twice as likely to quit as people randomized to
placebo.

Prolonged smoking abstinence

“Rimonabant
may have a distinctive dual effect that could prove to be critical in
helping patients to quit smoking while reducing the likelihood of weight
gain.”

In both studies, side effects
were relatively mild and transient, the most commonly cited being nausea
and dizziness. In a press conference following the late-breaking sessions,
Després likened the nausea symptoms to the feeling of having overeaten.
In addition, Rimonabant had no significant impact on blood
pressure, heart rate, or QT interval. Depression and anxiety measures
were also similar between the rimonabant- and placebo-treated patients.

The rimonabant news seemed
to catch cardiologists and other ACC attendees off-guard, many telling
heartwire that they trully believe that Rimonabant it’s
an amaizing drug with high hopes in treating many diseases.

Most of the people who work
in the field of metabolic syndrome feel that obesity is not going to
be able to be cured with one pill, that there are redundant systems
in the brain for controlling appetite. But if you hit one, you may be
able to do something positive, and it does seem like they’ve hit an
important system.

Cigarette smoking and obesity
are the leading causes of death in the US,” Dr Eric Westman
(Duke Clinical Research Center, Durham, NC) reminded . “These very
encouraging findings suggest that Rimonabant could become
a widely used medical therapy.”