Prescription medications for the treatment of obesity

Along the years a troubled history featured the pharmacological therapy of obesity. Numerous once-promising weight-loss drugs have been abandoned because of a series of concomitant deleterious side effects. The recent withdrawn from the market of sibutramine and rimonabant is indeed a spectacular demonstration of the difficulties to obtain efficient safe weight-loss drugs devoid of any (or minimal) toxic effects. Nowadays, the approach to the pharmacological treatment of obesity is still based upon few traditional and historical drugs. In particular, the drugs currently approved by FDA are working mainly via the serotoninergic and noradrenergic pathways such as lorcaserin and phentermine/topiramate. Nevertheless, one should take in mind that a concomitant disagreement in the efficacy assessment of these drugs recently occurred between American and European agencies.