3 new diet pills race to hit market

NEW YORK, Oct. 22 (UPI) -- Three pharmaceutical companies are racing to get their new diet pills to market first, drug company scientists said.

In the drugs' trials, some patients showed improvements in cholesterol, blood pressure, triglycerides and blood-sugar control, USA Today reported Thursday.

The three medications are Contrave from Orexigen, Lorcaserin hydrochloride from Arena Pharmaceuticals and Qnexa from Vivus. It will be a year or more before the medications are available to the public, assuming they get the nod from the U.S. Food and Drug Administration.

"We are going to need many different medications in order to treat obesity effectively in the same way we have many different drugs to treat high blood pressure," Dr. Louis Aronne, the director of the Comprehensive Weight Control Center at NewYork-Presbyterian Hospital in New York who has researched all three of the drugs, told USA Today.

It may be that the most cost-effective way of addressing many chronic health problems driven by excess body weight -- high blood pressure, diabetes and cholesterol, for example -- is getting people to lose weight, Aronne said.

"What I envision is your weight could be the primary target of treatment because by treating your weight, not only will you get the diabetes, high blood pressure and high cholesterol, but you'll get the many other underlying problems caused by your excess weight. We could reduce healthcare costs by managing the root cause," Aronne said to the newspaper.

Eventually, taking several medications to lose and keep off weight may be necessary, as there are multiple mechanisms involved in the "biology of obesity," said Dr. Donna Ryan, associate executive director for clinical research at Pennington Biomedical Research Center in Baton Rouge, La.