Qnexa - Prescription Diet Pill

     Although Rimonabant has officially be given up on, there is another couple of new weight loss medications out there that have recently begun getting lots of news exposure. The names of these most recent medications are Lorcaserin, Contrave and Qnexa. Each one has its benefits and negatives and each are open for discussion and debate as to which may be approved by the FDA or whether any of them will be at all.
     Qnexa, some argue has a better chance of approval based on its weight loss results in the testing phases. This however may or may not be the case because the weight loss amounts produced within testing is not the entire story the FDA considers before approving or disapproving a weight loss medication. The main issue at hand is first, that a diet medication is considered to be within FDA guidelines of producing weight loss according to their standards, then whether or not the side effects are considered reasonable. A weight loss drug can produce outstanding weight loss but it would be rejected if the side effects where considered dangerous or too many. Qnexa produces weight loss above the FDA standard for a drug to be considered a weight loss drug but now we must wait on their decision about whether the side effects are considered safe enough for prescribing to the obese public.
     Qnexa produced by Vivus Inc, is actually a combination of two other drugs, Phentermine and Topiramate. So in essence there is not a new drug at all, but just a pairing of these two and given the trademark name Qnexa. However there is a difference in simply getting a prescription for both and taking together. Qnexa is a special mixture of the two, with relatively low doses of each drug and with specialized release formulas that have been tested with thousands of patients over a few years. It would be extremely foolish and dangerous to assume you could just mix these two together on your own and come up with the same product. But this does perhaps open the door for other Phentermine paired drugs to be studied in the future. Many have already heard of the infamous drug of Fen-Phen where Phentermine was paired up with Fenfluramine. This was the big craze years ago, but it was later found out that the Fenfluramine part was causing severe heart problems and Fen-Phen was scrapped. The Phentermine however lived on and has been the most prescribed weight loss drug. Phentermine has been around for decades but companies/people are always looking for the next big thing, and seeing if they can safely create a diet drug with fewer side effects or greater weight loss than Phentermine alone.
     But not all new diet drugs being created are a product of Phentermine and some other drug, there are two others, like Qnexa, that have already been submitted to the FDA for approval. These are Contrave (interestingly enough, a pairing of two other drugs, but not containing phentermine) and Lorcaserin (which has a similar chemical make up of Fenfluramine but has never shown any of the heart value problems associated with Fenfluramine) It will be interesting to see if Lorcaserin becomes accepted whether it will be regularly prescribed with Phentermine or not.