Treatment of obesity.

Current treatment of obesity seems to be focused mainly on the success of losing body weight, which can be achieved, in order of increasingly drastic manoeuvres: by simple nutritional advice; professional follow-up of a negative energy balance; drugs with effects on appetite regulation, energy absorption or expenditure; total seclusion with control of every administered calorie; surgical intervention; or even jaw-wiring. The only treatment of this sort that has been convincingly shown to have long-lasting effects is surgical intervention in the gastrointestinal tract, but this can only be accepted for use in severe cases. Thus, the problem of treatment of moderate obesity is to find an effective therapeutic modality which iss efficient in maintaining a reduced weight. Obesity treatment also seems to have focused too much on the mass of excess body fat, which is not necessarily an indicator of the medical hazards of the condition. It is important to realize that the risk factor clusters following obesity are often efficiently treated by successful reduction of the obese condition. Instead of specific treatment of each of these complications by, for example, multi-pharmacological therapy, a sufficiently efficient obesity treatment would be a preferable substitute. This goal may, if necessary, be achieved by treatment with a single drug with a useful therapeutic profile, including efficiency in the long-term to prevent relapse. Chronic treatment might then be considered acceptable in the same way as chronic pharmacological treatment of hypertension and hyperlipidemia, for example. No drug has as yet proven to have these characteristics.(ABSTRACT TRUNCATED AT 250 WORDS)