Rimonabant - News on Rimonabant and a Short Study of Rimonabant
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.
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.