"There's no medicine that is a panacea for obesity."
Cautioned said the study lead author Dr. Kishore Gadde, director of the Obesity Clinical Trials Program at Duke University Medical Center in Durham, N.C
"The question was to see if more weight loss could be achieved if we provided decent quality lifestyle intervention, mostly dietary counseling."
"And the answer was yes," Gadde said.
"But for about athird [of patients], biological issues are at play, such as not easily experiencing satiety signals from the gut to the brain."
And Lona Sandon, a registered dietitian and assistant professor of clinical nutrition at the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center at Dallas, agreed.
"The important thing to keep in mind is that although we diagnose obesity on the basis of a mathematical formula -- aBMI of 30 and up -- the basis for obesity may differ from one individual to another."
The research, funded by the U.S. National Institutes of Health, appears online Oct. 15 in the journal Archives of Internal Medicine .
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