QUEBEC CITY--30 Apr--PRNewswire-AsiaNet/InfoQuest At a late breaking presentation made on April 29th during the Annual meeting of the European Atherosclerosis Society held in Istanbul, the investigators of ADAGIO-LIPIDS presented the key findings of a one year trial aiming at further studying the effects of rimonabant on several features of HDL and on a comprehensive set of cardiometabolic markers. Furthermore, an imagingsubstudy using computed tomography was conducted to test, for the first time, the hypothesis that rimonabant could induce a loss of visceral fat and liver fat. "We know that the most prevalent form of the metabolic syndrome is associated with abdominal obesity, particularly with an excess of visceral fat as well as with accumulation of fat at undesired sites such as the liver, the heart, the muscle and the pancreas, a phenomenon referred to as ectopic fat deposition," mentioned Dr Jean-Pierre Despres from the Hopital Laval ResearchCenter, Universite Laval, Quebec, CANADA, who is the principal investigator of ADAGIO-LIPIDS. "Although we had evidence from the phase III studies conducted with rimonabant that antagonism of the endocannabinoid system could induce a reduction in waist circumference (a crude marker of abdominal fat) and improve several features of the metabolic syndrome, no study had ever quantified the effect of this drug on visceral adiposity and liver fat," he added. ADAGIO-LIPIDS was a study conducted in 799 patients with abdominal obesity and with the high triglyceride - low HDL-cholesterol dyslipidemia. Patients were randomized to moderate caloric restriction (600 kcal/day) with either a placebo or rimonabant (20mg/day). First, results confirmed the consistent effects of rimonabant on several markers of cardiometabolic risk. For instance, HDL-cholesterol was increased by 7.4% with rimonabant compared to placebo (p