This April has been good news month in Philadelphia. According to a report published in Pediatrics, a research project to tackle obesity among children has been a success. Ten elementary schools were chosen, five instituted the weight loss program (although more local schools later began the program informally). Essentially, the proactive schools attacked the problem from three sides: through changing the food served in the cafeteria and sold through vending machines, by reintroducing physical exercise, and by teaching better lifestyles to both the children and their parents. Read the rest of this entry »

History is a strange beast. You can only see it when you turn and look back. The closer it is to you, the less easy it is to see. The difficulty with writing about acomplia is that you must always start somewhere. Wherever you pick in time, the real question is how far back to look. What have we taken for granted? What gaps have we left? So in this article, we catch up with the past. Just to make sure that we have everyone on the same virtual page. Read the rest of this entry »

  The pharmaceutical company, Sanofi-Aventis, has always promoted acomplia as achieving the best results when combined with a low-calorie diet and exercise. There is a simple explanation for this. People who are sufficiently motivated will lose weight if they reduce their calorie intake below their normal daily requirement and increase their metabolic rate through exercise. This forces the body to burn fat as stored energy to fill the gap. So why take acomplia? In the clinical trials, many of the people on placebo also lost weight. Read the rest of this entry »

At the meeting of the American College of Cardiology held in Chicago this March, Merck & Co released some clinical data from the Phase III trials for their proposed competitor to acomplia (rimonabant). This new medication, still going by its generic name of taranabant, targets the same cannabinoid system as acomplia. It is therefore interesting to compare results since, if it gains regulatory approval, it will be a direct competitor to acomplia. Read the rest of this entry »

  Science is one of those endlessly fascinating games that people play with ideas. The method could not be easier to state. You propose a hypothesis and design an experiment to collect evidence to test whether your hypothesis is true (I always pay particular attention when anyone starts talking about truth — if ever there was a flexible friend, truth would be it). So, now your results are in. You claim definitive evidence that “proves” what you speculated was either true or not true. Now it is up to the rest of the world to see whether it can replicate your findings. The more independent people who can reproduce the same results, the more likely it is that your hypothesis is true or not true. Read the rest of this entry »

  The bad news on obesity in the United States continues to roll in with about one third of adult Americans now considered obese. Against this continuous drip feed of research data showing the scale of the emerging medical crisis, it is all the more strange that the Food and Drug Administration continues to resist approving medications such as Acomplia. It would be easy to understand this reluctance if there were already three or four major medications on the market that would help to combat the epidemic spread of obesity. But this is not the case. Read the rest of this entry »

  In November, 2007 the British Medical Journal published a new piece of meta-research into the relative effectiveness of Orlistat, Meridia and Acomplia. The difficulty with conventional research is that each individual study usually only involves a few hundred volunteers. Although these studies have to be “statistically significant”, i.e. it must be reasonable to scale up the results so that they will offer a reasonable chance of being replicated in the community at large, one study cannot be anything more than an indicator. To get the best results, you need to take a number of published clinical trials and reanalyse the data to determine whether there are trends. This is what a meta-researcher does. Read the rest of this entry »

  Today, I am going to deal with three pieces of back-to-back news about the weight loss market in general and Acomplia in particular.

Decision Resources is one of the world’s leading research firms on health care and pharmaceutical issues. In a recent report, it confirms that obesity has reached epidemic proportion in seven of the world’s major markets: France, Germany, Great Britain, Italy, Japan, Spain and the United States. Given the potential need for effective treatments, the company predicts that the market will grow fivefold by 2016 from the base figures in 2006 where sales are estimated at $478 million to $2.7 billion. Read the rest of this entry »

  On the 26th March, Sanofi-Aventis, the third largest pharmaceutical manufacturer in the world, announced that the UK’s National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence (NICE), had approved Acomplia for use in the National Health Service (NHS). NICE is a non-governmental organisation. It plays the role of a gatekeeper and, if it approves a medication, its use in the NHS is subsidised out of public funds. Up to now, Acomplia has had approval granted by the European Medicines Agency (EMEA) for use on private prescription only. So patients have had to pay the full retail price for Acomplia. This decision by NICE means that patients who have a BMI of 30 or more, or a BMI of 27 with associated risk factors, can now get treatment without having to pay for Acomplia (the change of diet and the introduction of physical exercise have no additional cost implications). This is a small step forward for Sanofi-Aventis which has a good product but has found it difficult to promote its use. Read the rest of this entry »

  The girls rabbiting on about love handles didn’t hurt my pride — what’s left to hurt when you’ve been prodded and poked in a hospital — but made me take a proper look at myself. Now I’m less hooked on the idea of Acomplia, I can look in the mirror and not flinch. I’ve got spectacular scars on my chest with all the stitches out. But I’ve really gone to seed. I’m quite tall and big boned. Now, I’m looking like a half-melted candle with my head sticking up as the wick. Read the rest of this entry »