Hormone May Be Weight Loss Key
A hormone released by the stomach and upper intestine may be the key to helping overweight people shed extra pounds and keep them off, according to a study in Thursday’s New England Journal of Medicine.
“If this approach works, then it might be something we could use even for people who are only modestly overweight,” said Dr. David Cummings of the University of Washington in Seattle, chief author of the new study.
If controlling the hormone was found to be an effective treatment for obesity, it could help fight a worrying rise in overweight people in the United States.
A study published Tuesday in the Journal of the American Medical Assn. found that 1 in 5 Americans was overweight in 2000, up from just over 1 in 10 a decade earlier.
Some data indicate obesity now outranks smoking as a cause of disease and death, adding millions of dollars to the nation’s health-care costs.
In tests on 33 volunteers, the researchers found that, in most people, the levels of the hormone ghrelin rose before each meal and dropped after each meal.
But the five people who had undergone surgery to have food bypass their stomach turned out to be the significant exception. In those cases, ghrelin levels never rose or fell; remaining at nearly undetectable levels.
Because earlier research had shown that the hormone appears to be a key factor in controlling a person’s compulsion to eat, the researchers said the low levels of ghrelin seen in stomach bypass patients may account for their ability to lose lots of weight and, more important, keep it off.
“Suppression of ghrelin can now be studied as a potential mechanism by which (stomach bypass surgery) causes weight loss,” said Cummings and his colleagues in the research.
People trying to stay on a diet had the highest ghrelin levels, which may explain why people who lose weight typically have a hard time keeping it off.
The results are “suggesting that ghrelin might contribute to the drive to eat that makes long-term success with dieting so rare,” said Drs. Jeffrey S. Flier of Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center and Eleftheria Maratos-Flier of the Joslin Diabetes Center, both in Boston, in a Journal editorial.
“These data suggest that ghrelin antagonists may someday be considered in the treatment of obesity,” the researchers concluded.
But the Fliers cautioned that further studies are needed to see if treatment with a drug that blocks the effect of ghrelin is a safe and effective weight-loss treatment. Until then, stomach bypass surgery “will remain an important therapy for severe obesity,” they said.
And for people trying to put on weight, especially people suffering from cancer and other wasting disorders, it is possible that treatment with ghrelin may prevent the severe and dangerous weight loss, the Fliers said.
Two years ago, researchers reported in the journal Nature that injections of ghrelin made rodents eat more and become obese.
