(Bloomberg) -- Novo Nordisk A/S’s older weight-loss drug, Saxenda, helped children lose weight in a study, opening up the possibility of powerful obesity medications being prescribed to grade-school-aged kids.
Children with obesity aged 6 through 11 who got a Saxenda shot daily for 56 weeks saw their body mass index, or BMI, decline by an average of 5.8% in the study, while those who got a placebo experienced an increase of 1.6%, researchers said on Wednesday at the European Association for the Study of Diabetes meeting in Madrid. Side effects were in line with what’s been seen in adults, the researchers said. Novo funded the trial.
The results “provide much-needed evidence” on how the new class of GLP-1 weight-loss drugs affects children, potentially opening up a new treatment for them, according to an editorial in the New England Journal of Medicine. The medical journal also published the trial results.
Despite the booming market for obesity treatments in adults, and in some cases teenagers, none of the medications are approved for younger children. Novo said it has filed the Saxenda data with US and European drug regulators, and it’s already begun a study of its obesity blockbuster Wegovy on children.
With 82 patients, the Saxenda study is much smaller than the trials with thousands of patients that have been conducted in adults. More research is needed on what happens to kids who take obesity drugs over longer periods, said Claudia Fox, co-director at the Center for Pediatric Obesity Medicine at the University of Minnesota Medical School, who led the study.
“We have to be cautious and not imply that these medications are appropriate for every child,” Fox said. “But for children with more severe forms of obesity, they’re not seeing adequate results with lifestyle therapy alone.”
After the 56 weeks of treatment, the researchers took the children off Saxenda and observed them for a further 26 weeks. Both the children in the placebo group and those who’d taken the drug saw their BMI continue to creep upward, but their weight gain was roughly parallel — the Saxenda group didn’t catch back up to their peers, Fox said. That suggests that early treatment with drugs may have a lingering benefit, she said.
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