ABSTRACT
Type 2 diabetes mellitus (T2DM) is associated with excess morbidity and mortality, and is considered as one of the most costly and burdensome chronic diseases of our time (1). T2DM frequently coexists with a cluster of other cardiovascular and metabolic risk factors including abdominal obesity, low high-density lipoprotein-cholesterol (HDL-C), high triglycerides (TG), elevated blood pressure, and silent inflammation (elevated C-reactive protein), all of them being more or less closely related to insulin resistance and the so-called metabolic syndrome (2,3). T2DM increases the risk of cardiovascular disease (CVD) by 2 to 4 times andmay be considered as a “cardiovascular risk equivalent” (4). Therefore, treatment of multiple cardiovascular and metabolic risk factors is central to the management of T2DM (5,6). The importance of weight management is well recognized in T2DM (7-9), although affected patients often have more difficulty in losing weight than nondiabetic obese individuals and experience weight gain associated with most antidiabetic medications (7,9).
