United States: In a write up, late-stage trial of the weight loss drug, liraglutide, reveals children lowered more weight than those of placebo. According to the doctors, anybody who is classified as obese will always find it very hard to shed off some few pounds in equal to any age.
New medicines such as GLP-1 receptor agonists available for adults and children older than 12 are highly effective while younger children can only go for lifestyle changes like dieting, exercising, and counseling in case they want to lose some weight. Doctors suggest that even with more drastic measures children usually have rather limited improvements. That means it can have a considerable influence on BMI, the measure the practitioners use to diagnose obesity in a human, in younger children.
As reported by CNN, Liraglutide was finally okayed by the US Food and Drug Administration in the year 2014 as an aid to weight loss among the adult population. In the case of Comirnaty, in the year 2020 the approval was granted for kids and adolescents between the age of 12 to 17 years.
Essentials of the study are available online in the New England Journal of Medicine and the findings were also revealed at the annual meeting or can say an yearly meeting of the European Association just for the Study of Diabetes which is led by the first co-author, Dr. Claudia Fox, a pediatrician, and member of the Center for Pediatric Obesity Medicine, University of the Minnesota Medical School, Minneapolis.
The researchers studied the impact of the drug to children in the age bracket of 6 to 12 years with what is deemed as a high BMI. For instance, Fox pointed out that the average weight that a 10-year-old child has in the sample size of study was 155 pounds.
The trial involved 82 children and the 56 of these received a liraglutide injection once daily. The rest of them received a placebo. All of the children also underwent counseling on the need to improve on their nutrition and engaging in physical activities that include moderate to high-intensity exercises for not less than one hour daily.