Rutgers Health researchers have found that a weekly injection of diabetes medication could replace painful daily hormone shots for people with a rare genetic form of lipodystrophy that leaves patients with almost zero fat tissue, according to a study in The New England Journal of Medicine. Congenital generalized lipodystrophy (CGL), which affects only a few thousand people worldwide, results in severe metabolic disease, diabetes, insulin resistance and reduced life expectancy. With no fat tissue for proper storage, fat accumulates in organs such as the liver, leading to extreme insulin resistance and diabetes.
“These patients are severely ill and face markedly reduced life expectancy due to profound insulin resistance,” said Christoph Buettner, chief of endocrinology, metabolism, and nutrition at Rutgers Robert Wood Johnson Medical School and senior author of the study. Currently, the standard treatment for CGL involves daily injections of metreleptin, a synthetic version of the hormone leptin, which is naturally produced exclusively by fat tissue. However, daily leptin shots are both expensive – hundreds of thousands of dollars annually – and particularly painful for CGL patients. To read the full story.