2024-04-16 17:20:00
Active ingredient like the weight loss syringe diabetes medication is also said to help with Parkinson’s disease
April 16, 2024, 7:20 p.m
Diabetes remedies can have positive side effects, as the weight loss injection has recently proven. Now Parkinson’s patients could also benefit from the drug. According to a study, the active ingredient slows down the disease and stops the symptoms. But there were also side effects.
Parkinson’s is the second most common neurodegenerative disease after Alzheimer’s. In Germany alone, around 400,000 people are affected – and the trend is clearly growing. There is no cure. Neurologist Walter Pirker, former president of the Austrian Parkinson’s Society, emphasizes that therapies that work well in the early stages of the disease are all the more important “Standard”. A new study now provides such a therapeutic approach. The focus is once again on a drug that is actually used for diabetics – like the weight loss injection.
This time the diabetes drug is called Lixisenatide. Researchers have now examined its effect Study published in the “New England Journal of Medicine.”, on 156 people with mild to moderate Parkinson’s symptoms, all of whom were already taking the standard Parkinson’s drug levodopa or other medicines. Half of them received lixisenatide for one year, the other a placebo.
The result: After twelve months, the participants in the placebo control group showed, as expected, a worsening of their symptoms. On a scale assessing the severity of Parkinson’s disease, her score had increased by three points. For those who took the drug, the score on this scale did not change. The researchers concluded that lixisenatide was able to slow down the disease and stop the symptoms.
“That would be a huge success”
The study was unable to find out how the positive effect of the diabetes medication on Parkinson’s disease can be explained. What is interesting, however, is that lixisenatide is a so-called GLP-1 receptor agonist. These are blood sugar-lowering drugs that are primarily used to treat type 2 diabetes. Lixisenatide belongs to a large family of similar active ingredients that have recently been used as a “weight loss injection” (semaglutide) to treat obesity. GLP-1 drugs are known to reduce inflammation – this may have something to do with how they work.
“The results are very interesting,” commented Joseph Claßen, First Chairman of the German Society for Parkinson’s and Movement Disorders (DPG) and Director of the Clinic and Polyclinic for Neurology at the University Hospital Leipzig, on the new study. “If Parkinson’s disease could be slowed down with this class of drugs, that would be a huge success.” However, long-term studies are still needed, including with better-tolerated, related active ingredients, according to the expert. The effectiveness and safety must be proven in more patients.
Because taking the medication led to side effects in the test subjects. Half of them suffered from severe nausea, and some had to vomit repeatedly, according to the study. The researchers suspected that these unpleasant side effects were caused by too high a dose. They would have given those affected the highest possible dose directly, instead of increasing it gradually, as is usual with such diabetes and weight loss medications. For a third of the study participants whose side effects became intolerable, the researchers therefore halved the dose.
Exenatide also showed positive results
“A lot more research is needed to see whether GLP-1 receptor agonists are really the final answer for those affected by Parkinson’s and whether they can really be used to achieve a cure at some point,” said neurologist Pirker. Experts have been hoping for a long time that this could be a promising approach. Various studies have provided evidence that type 2 diabetes and some neurodegenerative diseases share similar signaling pathways.
A study from London published in 2017 suggests that the active ingredient exenatide, another diabetes drug that has been on the market in Germany since 2007, also at least slows the progression of Parkinson’s disease, albeit only to a small extent. At the time, the researchers suspected that exenatide improved the energy supply to the neurons by making them more receptive to insulin and thus reducing inflammatory reactions.
“Scientifically interesting are the questions not examined in the current study: whether GLP-1 drugs can protect against the loss of dopamine-producing neurons and perhaps prevent the onset of Parkinson’s,” says DPG boss Claßen. These would be very important goals because Parkinson’s disease cannot yet be treated causally.
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