Circulating total and intact GDF-15 levels are not altered in response to weight loss induced by liraglutide or lorcaserin treatment in humans with obesity

What Was Tested

The paper reports a study of Liraglutide in the context of fat loss, obesity & body recomposition, published as a randomized controlled trial.

In addition, the researchers perform exploratory correlations of total and intact GDF-15 with clinical, hormonal and metabolo-lipidomic parameters in humans with obesity.

Who Took Part

The study group was 5 subjects.

How the Study Was Run

The researchers set it up as a randomized, double-blind, placebo-controlled and crossover study.

Because people in this Liraglutide study were split into groups at random, differences between the groups are less likely to reflect who happened to join each one.

Blinding on both sides kept the subjects and researchers unaware of who received Liraglutide.

A placebo (an inactive look-alike) gave the Liraglutide group a baseline to be compared against.

In the crossover set-up each of the subjects took both Liraglutide and the comparison in turn, acting as their own control.

Total and intact GDF-15 levels were measured with novel enzyme-linked immunosorbent assays and the metabolomics and lipidomics analysis was performed with nuclear magnetic resonance spectroscopy.

What Was Measured

Topics PubMed links to this paper include Benzazepines, Growth Differentiation Factor 15, Liraglutide, Obesity, Receptor, Serotonin, 5-HT2C, Serotonin 5-HT2 Receptor Agonists and Weight Loss.

The authors tagged it with the keywords GDF15, GFRAL, GLP1, GLP1RA, Lorcaserin and TGFB.

What This Means in Plain Language

The paper is a randomized, double-blind and placebo-controlled study of Liraglutide in 5 subjects in people with fat loss, obesity & body recomposition.

With fewer than 40 people, it is a small study, so it is better read as an early signal for further research than as a settled answer.

Results are reported in around 4 sentences of the abstract; we leave them to the paper itself rather than summarise them.

The publication is from 2022 (Metabolism: clinical and experimental), a journal based in United States.

More context: the Liraglutide compound page, Fat loss, obesity & body recomposition research.