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Medicine

Banned Weight-loss Drug Could Combat Liver Disease, Diabetes 77

Posted by Soulskill from the things-that-were-good-but-then-bad-but-then-good dept.
sciencehabit writes: A drug the U.S. government once branded "extremely dangerous and not fit for human consumption" deserves a second chance, a study of rats suggests. Researchers report (abstract) that a slow-release version of the compound reverses diabetes and nonalcoholic fatty liver disease (NAFLD), an untreatable condition that can lead to cirrhosis and liver cancer.
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Banned Weight-loss Drug Could Combat Liver Disease, Diabetes More

Banned Weight-loss Drug Could Combat Liver Disease, Diabetes

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  • ...they fire it up and let it run for 18 hours.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by sycodon ( 149926 )

      Wait...what? Diabetes? Jet Engines?

      Is it Friday yet?

  • not fit for human consumption (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Errol backfiring ( 1280012 ) on Friday February 27, 2015 @11:14AM (#49147337) Journal
    Funny, I would label a rust remover "extremely dangerous and not fit for human consumption". Especially if by drinking it you are just begging for diabetes. But Cola is still not banned from the supermarket.

    • Re:not fit for human consumption (Score:5, Informative)

      by ihtoit ( 3393327 ) on Friday February 27, 2015 @11:41AM (#49147553)

      water isn't a rust remover, neither is sugar syrup.

      The amount of phosphoric acid used in cola is so minute it's barely detectable, but yes it is an active corrosive and yes it does cause demineralisation of tooth enamel.

    • We have had Cola for generations.... However the health conditions that we blame it for, have been on the rise just recently.

      I see the use of Corn Syrup being a bigger factor than blaming Cola.

      • Re: (Score:2, Insightful)

        by Anonymous Coward
        And cola used to be a once a week or month treat, not a two-three times a meal and constantly between meals drink. Also reduced activity, etc.

      • Re:not fit for human consumption (Score:5, Informative)

        by EvilSS ( 557649 ) on Friday February 27, 2015 @12:28PM (#49147901)

        We have had Cola for generations.... However the health conditions that we blame it for, have been on the rise just recently.

        I see the use of Corn Syrup being a bigger factor than blaming Cola.

        Corn Syrup, increasing portion sizes, a shift to low fat, high carb diets, labeling bad fats as good and good fats as bad.... The past 50 years has not been a good period for nutritional science.

        • Clearly, we just need to do what Eric Cartman did this past season of South Park -- turn the food pyramid upside down :)

      • Re: (Score:1)

        by itzly ( 3699663 )

        Corn syrup is pretty much equivalent to sugar for our bodies.

        • Corn syrup is pretty much equivalent to sugar for our bodies.

          For some value of "pretty much". HFCS both changes the mix of the simple sugars by tilting it towards fructose, but it provides them in partially-digested form. That bypasses the normal first step of splitting glucose, and creates an immediate overload of the rest of the process.

          Our bodies were designed to store extra energy for use later. If the carbs digest slowly then they don't swamp the system and the storage systems aren't triggered. A slower release of glucose means there isn't a heavy demand for

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by Megane ( 129182 )

        Corn syrup is probably why I stopped drinking Coca-Cola and switched to (aspartame) Diet Coke. It just didn't taste as good, though in recent years I've heard that may be because its flavor is more temperature-sensitive, and aspartame isn't. (Then I gave up DC so I wouldn't have to maintain a consistent caffeine dosage to avoid headaches, but I do get CFDC in the gold cans from time to time.)

        But I also liked the original formula (with sucrose), enough that I could tell the difference in an unexpected blind

      • We have had Cola for generations.... However the health conditions that we blame it for, have been on the rise just recently.

        It has been going down hill ever since they removed the cocaine and cola nuts.

    • Re:not fit for human consumption (Score:5, Interesting)

      by krisbrowne42 ( 549049 ) on Friday February 27, 2015 @11:50AM (#49147627)
      At least one other dangerous explosive is commonly used for regulation of heart problems already (nitro-glycerin).

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by Anonymous Coward

      The best rust remover I have yet come across is apple cider vinegar.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Jawnn ( 445279 )
      "Is DNP right for you? Ask your doctor. May cause seizure, coma, death and erections lasting longer than four hours."

      • "Is DNP right for you? Ask your doctor. May cause seizure, coma, death and erections lasting longer than four hours."

        In that order?

  • The drug is 2,4-dinitrophenol (DNP) (Score:5, Informative)

    by Anonymous Coward on Friday February 27, 2015 @11:19AM (#49147381)

    Title and summary didn't name the subject of the article, adding here.

  • just FYI (Score:5, Informative)

    by ihtoit ( 3393327 ) on Friday February 27, 2015 @11:39AM (#49147539)

    The drug is dinitrophenol. From the medical texts:

    DNP is an ATP inhibitor, which means it prevents cell mitochondria from synthesising ATP from simple sugars. Taken in excess, DNP can cause cell death by starvation and organism death by hyperthermia (it causes an imbalance in the proton gradient which results in the release of large amounts of heat). The good: you'll be thin. The bad: you'll be dead. But at least you won't be cold.

    Industrial uses include a precursor to sulphur dyes, and a component in liquid and plastic explosives. The US FDA and the UK's Food Standards Agency have both condemned DNP as a dangerous industrial chemical that should not be taken internally. Doses as low as 20mg/kg (in humans) are shown to be lethal (http://dx.doi.org/10.1081%2Fclt-200058946).

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by swm ( 171547 )

      Heh...if this is the drug I'm thinking of... ...ATP inhibitor...imbalance in the proton gradient...

      What it does is leak protons across the mitochondrial membrane, which is tantamount to creating an internal short circuit in a battery.
      You know, like those Lithiuum-ion batteries that sometimes spontaneously combust.

      One of the first things the FDA did after it was established was get this stuff off the market.

    • Re:just FYI (Score:5, Interesting)

      by omnichad ( 1198475 ) on Friday February 27, 2015 @12:31PM (#49147913) Homepage

      Doses as low as 20mg/kg (in humans) are shown to be lethal (http://dx.doi.org/10.1081%2Fclt-200058946).

      That's roughly 20 times the LD50 of nicotine. And probably right in the range of lots of other useful drugs.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by mpe ( 36238 )
      DNP is an ATP inhibitor, which means it prevents cell mitochondria from synthesising ATP from simple sugars.

      Mitochondria can't handle sugars anyway. What happens is that sugars must first be converted to something mitochondria can use within the cytoplasm. This is generally either pyruvate or lactate.
      On the other hand mitochondria can directly use carboxylic acids.

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by Anonymous Coward

      Doses as low as 20mg/kg (in humans) are shown to be lethal

      Which is actually a pretty freaking high dosage for many drugs. That's two grams for a somewhat overweight guy (220 lbs). The thyroid medicine I take (danger, contains iodine, a disinfectant!) is less than 100 micrograms total, or about 0.001 mg/kg.

      Someone above mentioned nitroglycerin. I carry that around in my pocket, just in case (never needed it).

      And the blood-thinner coumadine is also known as warfarin, a widely-used rat poison.

      As the s

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by HiThere ( 15173 )

        Well, my wife needs a blood thinner, but strenuously avoided coumadine-warfarin. You can't eat green vegetables if you take warfarin, because vitamin K deactivates it. (So she's taking apixaban, which isn't affected by diet.)

        • > You can't eat green vegetables if you take warfarin,

          That's ok. I don't eat green vegetables anyway.

      • The dose makes the poison: There is an excellent book by that name: http://www.amazon.com/Dose-Mak... [amazon.com] It should be required reading before posting on this topic.

    • DNP is an ATP inhibitor, which means it prevents cell mitochondria from synthesising ATP from simple sugars.

      I think I understand what you're trying to say, but let me make it a bit more clear using a car analogy. Yes, you get less ATP out at the end, but that's not really the point of the drug.

      DNP is an oxidative phosphorylation decoupler. What this means, it that it does the equivalent of popping your clutch into neutral, and then stomping on the gas. Your mitochondria will rev-up furiously, but no ATP is produced as you have just decoupled the connection between the engine and the wheels. In the meantime, y

    • Go look up some accounts of bodybuilders who have taken DNP for weight loss. This "drug" (more accurately termed a poison) is used in a variety of places, including: "Commercial DNP is primarily used as an antiseptic. It is a precursor to sulfur dyes.[2] DNP is a chemical intermediate in the production of some herbicides including dinoseb and dinoterb. It has also been used to make photographic developer and explosives." People who inject grams of steroids and all other kinds of drugs even refuse to take i

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by hey! ( 33014 )

      Well, like Paracelsus said, the dose makes the poison. Or in this case the release mechanism.

      Blood concentrations of drugs usually peak an hour or two after ingestion and then taper off depending on the mechanisms the body uses to either break the drug down or excrete it directly (when you're an old Geek, you begin to pick up a lot of this stuff). So it's entirely plausible that the same amount of drug which would be dangerous in an ordinary pill would be acceptably safe in a timed release formulation, p

  • It's not known as NAFLD. It's known as NASH. Non Alcoholic SteatoHepatitis. It's even in the title of the TFA FFS.

    • Well, NAFLD is a real thing and related to NASH.

      One issue I have, is that the very first sentence of the abstract is probably incorrect. NAFLD doesn't lead to diabetes, it's the other way around. In the full article, they back away from saying NAFLD causes diabetes and merely says they are related. The biggest problem, is that they used rats, and rats just don't get diabetes, NASH, or NAFLD (or heart disease either, for that fact), so they have to heavily heavily manipulate the rats' genetic background, as

      • I haven't read the study in detail yet, but in general, yes - the study will be bad. They usually are.

        Feeding rats on trans-fat laden crisco was the generally preferred way to screw up a rat's metabolism. The disappearance of trans-fats from supermarket shelves has revealed holes in many studies when they're found to not be repeatable.

        Long term consumption of low-dose DNP has an air of "What could possibly go wrong?" to it.

  • Remember Thalidomide (Score:3)

    by rssrss ( 686344 ) on Friday February 27, 2015 @12:33PM (#49147931)

    It was banned after it was discovered to be the cause of severe birth defects. Later it was discovered to be useful for:

    ... for a number of conditions including: erythema nodosum leprosum, multiple myeloma and a number of other cancers, for some symptoms of HIV/AIDS, Crohn's disease, sarcoidosis, graft-versus-host disease, rheumatoid arthritis and a number of skin conditions that have not responded to usual treatment.

    URL [wikipedia.org].

    Any drug that is sufficiently powerful to cure you, also has the power to hurt you. The converse is true also.

    • INT. RORITOR BUILDING BOARD ROOM
      BIG STUMMIES SCIENTIST: Well, Ive been working on a thing. It's, uh, sorta like Stummies.
      DON: Go on. I like what I hear.
      BIG STUMMIES SCIENTIST: It's exactly like Stummies.
      DON: And the twist is?
      BIG STUMMIES SCIENTIST: It's a much bigger pill.
      DON: I like a lot. Is it ready for production?
      BIG STUMMIES SCIENTIST: Yes sir, it's ready to go.
      DON: Yeah, have there been any side effects?
      BIG STUMMIES SCIENTIST Yes sir, a few side effects.
      NATALIE: Well that's OK. As

  • The future of medicine (Score:4, Interesting)

    by jd.schmidt ( 919212 ) on Friday February 27, 2015 @01:52PM (#49148649)
    In the future, our laws and the FDA are going to have to reform to adjust to a new realty. In brief, there no bad chemicals or bad drugs, only bad uses. Medicine has been so extraordinarily good at providing near miraculous cures, that we have come to have a "magic pill" mindset. This drug magically cures this disease and is "safe". The reality of medicine is a series of tradeoffs, typically the tradeoffs are greatly to our advantage, but not always. Further, it has long been known that a drug that works for one person doesn't work for someone else. There is no doubt that targeted medicine, what I consider a subset of open source medicine, is the next critical system break through. For example, this is why it is so intriguing to be putting IBM Watson on the task of medicine, Watson will be able to analysis your personal health makeup and suggest a drug appropriate for you, along with recommended possible side effect markers to watch and even possibly test for! How do you go about regulating medicine is such an environment, in the future it will no longer make sense for the FDA to "approve" or "disapprove" a drug. Rather the most sensible course will be to monitor an accurate database of effects and make sure all the participants are following correct recording procedures, along with assuring purity of products. If you follow through this logic, you will quickly realize it calls into question the current system of patents. Where an entity has a financial interest is promoting a particular drug, it also has an interest in suppressing negative information and promoting positive. Under such circumstances it isn’t strongly in anyone personal interest, other than an illegal cartel, to promote inappropriate uses of a particular drug. Obviously some system of financial rewards/incentives need to be applied, and of course no can work for free. But just as the open source software movement hasn’t killed off software companies, nor will making a space for open source medicine kill of drug companies. Indeed the free flow of ideas has only enhanced technological progress. I hope I have convinced some of you to embrace a move to open source medicine.

  • I prevent non-alcholic fatty liver disease with large volumes of alcohol.

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