Orlistat Abuse Reported

The Food and Drug Administration recently approved orlistat (Xenical‚) for the management and treatment of significantly obese patients. Now, however, Spanish researchers have reported two cases of two normal-weight patients, both nurses, who used the drug to purge. Both women had easy access to the intestinal lipase inhibitor, and used it as their only purging mechanism (Int J Eat Disord 30:458, 2001).

In the first case, a 26-year-old nurse, who had an eating disorder for 13 years, began to abuse the drug when she was 25 (coinciding with the market launch of orlistat in Spain). In the second case, a 34-year-old woman developed purging subtype BN. When she was 18 years old, she had frequent binge-eating episodes followed by vomiting and daily misuse of laxatives and diuretics. When she was 33, she began to misuse orlistat.

These cases point out that it might be a good idea to question anorexic and bulimic patients about orlistat use.