Close Concerns Weblog

Childhood Obesity – The Shape of Things to Come

Dr. David S. Ludwig, a well-known and very highly-regarded child obesity specialist from the Children's Hospital in Boston, wrote a sobering editorial entitled "Childhood Obesity – The Shape of Things to Come" that was recently published in the prestigious scientific journal The New England Journal of Medicine. In his editorial, Dr. Ludwig projects that obesity in children may shorten average life expectancy by two to five years by midcentury (~2050). We stopped short when we read that - whew.

Combination therapy: the future of obesity drugs?

Few dispute the need for better drugs to treat obesity. In the US and around the world, obesity rates are soaring, driving the prevalence of related conditions like diabetes, and lowering lifespan. Lifestyle modification is only moderately successful at reducing weight in most patients, and bariatric surgery, though highly successful at reducing weight, is highly invasive, has safety concerns, and is not recommended for any patients with a BMI under 40 or 35 with a comorbid condition. Drugs currently lie somewhere in between lifestyle modification and surgery with respect to efficacy and invasiveness. Potentially damaging side effects of currently approved drugs are worse than dieting alone, but better than bariatric surgery. Tolerability is also an issues with many weight loss drugs. As a number of obesity experts have said, the eventual goal for obesity drugs should be to have the effectiveness of bariatric surgery, with the safety of lifestyle intervention.

Avandia in the news again

Check out our Revolution Health blog on what the Institute for Clinical Evaluative Sciences (ICES) had to report on Avandia use in older popultions. ICES published their report in the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA) issue dated December 12th 2007.

Solid Third Quarter 2007 Performance for J&J

In September, Johnson & Johnson’s diabetes franchise, LifesScan/Animas posted its strongest growth quarter since 2005. LifeScan sales of $585 million rose a whopping 16% from last year. This growth is being fueled (unfortunately) by more patients with diabetes and fortunately (we hope) by more patients thinking more about how to use tools like blood glucose monitoring and insulin pumps appropriatley. Note that J&J has a very strong international diabetes business with sales of $264 million, an increase of 17% over a year ago – as we understand it, they are working particularly hard in developing countries, which we think is very good since that is the part of the globe that needs better diabetes care the most. That said – so does that US, where sales were $321 million (up 15% from a year ago.).

SIRT1 - A new and exciting diabetes drug class

On November 29th, an intriguing study published in the journal Nature by researchers at Sirtris Pharmaceuticals caught our eye. The study describes three compounds that are in the very earliest stages of testing, and it will be many years if ever before these compounds come to market; but the study is exciting because it shows yet another front where diabetes research is advancing.