Clinical Trials for Diet, Physical Activity, & Weight Management

The NIDDK conducts and supports clinical trials in many diseases and conditions, as well as healthy lifestyle-related behaviors, including diet, physical activity, and weight management, among different populations. The trials look to find new ways to prevent, detect, or treat disease and improve quality of life.

What are clinical trials for diet, physical activity, and weight management?

Clinical trials—and other types of clinical studies—are part of medical research and involve people like you. When you volunteer to take part in a clinical study, you help doctors and researchers learn more about diseases and improve health care for people in the future.

Researchers are studying many aspects of diet, physical activity, and weight management, such as

• identifying which people may respond to a specific type of diet
• learning how physical activity improves or maintains weight and overall health
• learning how lifestyle changes may improve weight and health at different ages

Find out if clinical studies are right for you.

Watch a video of NIDDK Director Dr. Griffin P. Rodgers explaining the importance of participating in clinical trials.

What clinical trials for diet, physical activity, and weight management are open?

You can view a filtered list of clinical studies on diet, physical activity, and weight management that are federally funded, open, and recruiting at www.Clinical Trials.gov. You can expand or narrow your search to include clinical studies from industry, universities, and individuals; however, the NIH does not review these studies and cannot ensure they are safe. Always talk with your health care professional before you participate in a clinical study.

What have we learned about diet, physical activity, and weight management from NIDDK-funded research?

The NIDDK has supported many research projects to learn more about diet, physical activity, and weight management. For example, recent studies suggest that

• adolescents with severe obesity and type 2 diabetes who receive weight-loss surgery, also called metabolic and bariatric surgery, may have lower blood sugar levels, lose more weight, and benefit in other ways compared with adolescents who receive medical therapy, according to the Teen-Longitudinal Assessment of Bariatric Surgery (Teen-LABS) study.
• adolescents who had weight-loss surgery had remission of diabetes and hypertension (high blood pressure) more often than adults with the same surgery, according to the Teen-LABS study.
• first-time mothers who learned how to respond effectively to their infant’s cues for hunger, sleep, feeding, and other infant behaviors helped improve their children’s body mass index (BMI) scores at 3 years old, according to results of the Intervention Nurses Start Infants Growing on Health Trajectories (INSIGHT) study. Second siblings also benefit from the responsive parenting strategies that their parents had applied with their first-born infants, as measured when the second babies are 1 year old, according to a follow-up study called SIBSIGHT.
• increased glucose levels in pregnant women might be associated with increased infant birth weight, increased levels of serum C-peptide (a substance that shows how much insulin the body is making) in the newborn’s cord, increased risk of cesarean delivery, and clinical hypoglycemia (lower-than-normal blood sugar) in the newborn, according to the Hyperglycemia and Adverse Pregnancy Outcome Follow-Up Study (HAPO-FUS).