Can my drug fight two modern plagues?

I’M NOT ashamed to admit that I have always struggled to control my weight. This was brought home to me rather bluntly a few years ago when my doctor informed me that if I didn’t do something about the extra three stone I was lugging around, I was at risk of becoming pre-diabetic.

So I took myself off to one of those joyless Austrian fat farms and began intermittent fasting. I lost a couple of stone in the space of a few months. Then, as ever, my weight began to creep back up.

This time I wasn’t giving up. I went to see a bariatric surgeon about the possibility of a gastric band. Instead, he prescribed something called liraglutide, a daily jab used by the NHS on patients with diabetes to help stabilise blood sugar — but which also has the happy side-effect of reducing appetite, thereby causing weight loss.

It’s been slow but steady. Over the past two years, I have gone from a size 18 to a stable 14, and although I could do with jettisoning a bit more around the middle, I am now within the correct range for my age.

Why am I telling you all this? Well, because this week a major study at Exeter University found that not only does liraglutide help patients manage diabetes and lose weight, it also slashes the risk of developing dementia by half.

Yes, that’s correct: half. This it does partly because of the way it stabilises blood sugars, but also by reducing the number of toxic amyloid proteins that contribute to the disease.

Before I started taking liraglutide, I was either hungry and miserable or fat and miserable. Now I am neither.

The fact that this little jab may even help me keep my marbles is just the cherry on the low-fat cake.