Word: weightness
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...signed up. For two years, she and thousands of other overweight patients maintained a low-fat diet, exercised--and swallowed a medication called orlistat three times a day. "My clothes started fitting a lot looser after a month," she says. Today Smith is down to 150 lbs., her prepregnancy weight. Not only that, but she's maintaining the loss and hopes to drop even more...
Officially, orlistat is supposed to be taken only by the obese--those whose weight is at least 30% higher than it should be (27% for those with high blood pressure, high cholesterol or diabetes). But this is just a guideline: once a drug has been approved, doctors can prescribe it any way they want. And given Americans' obsession with getting slim, the demand could be enormous. "The reality," says Dr. Steven Heymsfield, deputy director of the Obesity Research Center at St. Luke's Roosevelt Hospital in New York City, "is that millions of people who have tried everything else...
...orlistat isn't dramatically effective by itself. All the patients in the double-blind study went on strict eating regimens and exercise programs. Half of them were given orlistat, and half got an inert placebo. While those in the orlistat group lost an average of 10% of their initial weight after six months, the folks on the sugar pills lost nearly as much--a not inconsiderable...
...enough of a difference to justify putting orlistat on the market, says Dr. Jules Hirsch, an obesity expert at Rockefeller University and a member of the FDA advisory panel that evaluated the drug. Hirsch voted against approval. "We're talking about something that will take a little bit of weight off--a little more than a placebo--for a few years," he says, "but that will not make obesity vanish. The question is, How valuable is that...
...itself, not all that valuable. Ideally, says St. Luke's Heymsfield, doctors should first urge obese patients to change their diet and start exercising regularly. If they still can't lose weight, he would add orlistat to the mix. Another possibility, suggests Duke's Hamilton, is to use orlistat with an appetite suppressant. The value of this new drug, says Heymsfield, is that it adds to the available anti-obesity therapies and lets doctors tailor the treatment to a patient's needs. "I don't see Xenical as something to displace one or another of the currently available drugs...