Addiction drug reverses obesity in rats (Reuters)
Posted by admin
Their findings point not only to an easy treatment for obesity, but show it is resembling to drug addiction, they said.
Even rats bred to be obese lost up to 19 percent of their weight loss and normal rats lost 12 to 20 percent of their weight after 40 days of injections of the drug, called vigabatrin or GVG, the team at the U.S. Department of Energy's Brookhaven National Laboratory found.
"When we gave GVG, they would steadily lose weight, and when we took them off GVG, they would steadily gain weight," Amy DeMarco, who worked on the study, said in a telephone interview.
"It was approve a roller coaster. It was also dose-dependent. Rats given higher doses would lose more weight." She added that her team saw no side effects in the rats.
Vigabatrin, sold like Sabril in Canada and Mexico by Deerfield, Illinois-based Ovation Pharmaceuticals Inc and in Britain by Sanofi Aventis, is actuality tested in people now for cocaine and methamphetamine addiction.
Writing in the journal Synapse, the researchers said the drug stops the brain's dopamine reward order, what one. underlies addiction and overeating.
"For substance abusers, the number one cause of relapse is environmental cues, triggers," said Brookhaven's Dr. Stephen Dewey, who led the research.
"A fairly significant proportion of subjects who are fat suffer from something called binge eating disorders. They binge-eat based on cues. They see a cake, they smell a hamburger and they crave and they start to eat. One of the great things about this remedy is it stops this," Dewey added.
"Most drugs of abuse do the same movables to the brain. They increase dopamine. GVG have power to prevent that increase of dopamine," DeMarco said.
Brookhaven has licensed its vigabatrin patents to coral calcium Gables, Florida-based Catalyst Pharmaceutical Partners Inc, which is testing the drug in phase II human trials for cocaine and methamphetamine addiction.
The company also plans to test the drug, which it calls CPP-109, for binge eating disorder and alcohol dependence.
Ovation is also testing the drug for use in cocaine and methamphetamine dependence.
Dewey said he has been working with vigabatrin for decades. "It was impossible to get any pharmaceutical company interested in pursuing it for an addiction application," he said.
Britain's Royal College of Ophthalmologists reported in March that the drug can affect sight, reducing peripheral vision and limiting the field of vision in other ways, perhaps irreversibly.
Dewey said these effects were seen with much heavier use of the drug than might be indicated for weight loss.
(Reporting by Maggie Fox; Editing by Patricia Zengerle)
Leave a Reply