Thanks for that link. I am very interested in Elora and Reta, but these rat studies certainly drove home the point of the combined effect. I took a screen shot of the charts showing the additive effect of Elora and Tirz in rats.
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There are some interesting trends hiding in the graphs if one takes the time to spot them:
The "co-administration" food intake graph suggests that elora (as administered) seems to have a more stable/predictable effect on appetite than tirz (or tirz + elora). With tirz you see one heavy day of eating followed by two lighter days of eating. Meanwhile elora has much less day to day variability in eating.
The 3 day cadence for tirz is to be expected, since the drug was dosed every 3rd day in this trial and elora being more stable makes sense since due to a longer half-life, there would be less day to day variability in serum concentration of elora VS tirz.
With tirz alone, you had two days of appetite suppression followed by a 3rd day in which the rats would "pig out" and eat more than the control rats on those days. Meanwhile, once saturated, the elora rats appear to have even more stable day to day appetite levels than the control rats.
Meanwhile, the elora rats in the same "co-administration" food graph returned to eating nearly the same amount of food as the control rats at about 3 weeks into the trial, which is certainly an interesting result. Normally (for diet induced weight loss), a reduced average daily intake level would be maintained (to the extent that a given weight loss result is maintained). I mean the average is technically lower, but not that much lower as one closes in on the end of the trial.
This tells me that the "calories" tracking/obsessed folks will likely do better psychologically on elora than on a GLP unless they're taking more frequent GLP doses to smooth out day to day variability or they're employing other means (e.g. diet composition changes to help manage appetite). The trial can't inform on the latter since the rats presumably are being fed some standardized chow of uniform composition.
Moving onto the "adjunctive" graph. It's interesting just how much appetite is crushed (and for two full shot cycles) on the tirz + max elora graph. Even though at this point tirz had already plateaued before the elora was added, it crushes appetite nearly as much as it did for the first two cycles on the co-administration graph (where both tirz and elora were started at the same time). It's not looking like longer-term this impacts the overall weight loss plateau, but it's wild that overall food consumption seems to track so similarly with the red squares on both graphs (despite one representing a rat new to GLPs and one represents an "experienced" GLP rat).
