Glucagon-like peptide 1 decreases lipotoxicity in non-alcoholic steatohepatitis

What Was Tested

The paper reports a study of Liraglutide, published as a randomized controlled trial.

Insulin resistance and lipotoxicity are pathognomonic in non-alcoholic steatohepatitis (NASH).

Glucagon-like peptide-1 (GLP-1) analogues are licensed for type 2 diabetes, but no prospective experimental data exists in NASH.

This study determined the effect of a long-acting GLP-1 analogue, liraglutide, on organ-specific insulin sensitivity, hepatic lipid handling and adipose dysfunction in biopsy-proven NASH.

Who Took Part

The age groups tagged for this paper are adults, middle-aged adults and older adults, both men and women.

Patients underwent paired hyperinsulinaemic euglycaemic clamps, stable isotope tracers, adipose microdialysis and serum adipocytokine/metabolic profiling.

In vitro isotope experiments on lipid flux were performed on primary human hepatocytes.

How the Study Was Run

The design is described as randomized, double-blind and placebo-controlled.

Random assignment meant chance, not the researchers, decided who got Liraglutide and who got the comparison, which limits bias.

As a double-blind Liraglutide study, the assignments were hidden from both participants and investigators until the end.

The comparison arm used a placebo, so changes seen with Liraglutide could be set against what happens without it.

What Was Measured

PubMed files the paper under topics including Body Mass Index, Drug Monitoring, Glucagon-Like Peptide 1, Glucose Clamp Technique, Glycated Hemoglobin, Hypoglycemic Agents and Insulin Resistance.

Author keywords: Adipose tissue, Insulin sensitivity, Lipolysis and Non-alcoholic fatty liver.

What This Means in Plain Language

The paper is a randomized, double-blind and placebo-controlled study of Liraglutide.

Its findings take up roughly 6 sentences of the abstract and are left out here on purpose; the source paper is the place to read them.

The publication is from 2016 (Journal of hepatology), a journal based in Netherlands.

More context: the Liraglutide compound page.