Research
Hormonal
Exogenous leptin therapy is effective in treating obesity and metabolic disorders only in individuals with congenital leptin deficiency or generalized lipodystrophy, but is ineffective for the majority of people with common obesity.
Leptin therapy is not a weight-loss drug for the general public. It is a life-saving treatment for rare genetic conditions where the body produces no leptin. For most people with obesity, adding more leptin does not work because the body has stopped listening to it.
StrongQualifiesVERY_HIGH confidence
In patients with congenital leptin deficiency, leptin is able to normalize energy balance, through a major effect on the reduction of food intake [55, 56]. Equally true is that most subjects with obesity are not deficient in leptin, rather exhibit higher circulating leptin levels than those in non-obese subjects, which is a feature of leptin resistance [10].
Why this rating
Strong clinical evidence for specific deficiencies, well-documented in the review.
Source
Leptin as a key regulator of the adipose organ
Catalina Picó et al. · Reviews in Endocrine and Metabolic Disorders · 2021
DOI 10.1007/s11154-021-09687-5
narrative_reviewCited 259×
Read the paper DOI resolved against Crossref · corpus check 2026-06-10
More from this paper
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- Leptin directly stimulates lipid oxidation and lipolysis in white adipose tissue (WAT) through sympathetic nervous system activation and direct receptor binding, independent of its central effects on food intake.Good
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