Your diabetes med could help you shed kilos

Diabetic and want to lose weight? Now you can do both with help of a single medicine, as a new study has shown that Liraglutide, an injectable diabetes drug, helps people shed kilos.

US regulators had approved the drug last year for weight loss, and a randomised, controlled trial at 191 sites in 27 countries in Europe, North America, South America, Asia, Africa and Australia, found that it helped obese people lose an average of eight kilograms.

The drug is marketed as Saxenda by Novo Nordisk, GMA Network reported.

Kevin Williams, chief of endocrinology, diabetes and metabolism at Temple University Health, who wasn’t involved in the study, termed the weight loss in the liraglutide group as “significant.”

The drug had side effects like gastrointestinal distress, gallstones and a slight increase in breast cancer risk.

Researchers said that they needed to explore further on the breast cancer findings, adding that it was possible that weight loss enabled more tumors to be found.

The findings are published in the New England Journal of Medicine.