This Year’s Best Paper Award now Decided!

Dear Reader,

Already another year has passed and it is time to announce the winner of the 2014 Thieme Award for the Best Original Paper. The decisive criteria for this prize are based on scientific quality as well as on the number of citations drawn thus far. The winners will receive a prize money of USD 2 000.

This year’s winner is a paper by C. Seifarth and coworkers, with the title “Effectiveness of Metformin on Weight Loss in Non-Diabetic Individuals with Obesity” [1].

Here is what the jury, Professors Nawroth and Gudermann, have to say about their choice:

“Weight loss is a still unsolved problem in Western society. Several drugs have been withdrawn from the market due to their side effects. The investigators have tested the effect of Metformin in non-diabetic patients with a body mass index of over 27 kg/m². While the Metformin-treated group lost about 5.8 kg, the controls gained 0.8 kg – a rather significant difference. Of clinical importance is the finding that patients with severe insulin resistance lost significantly more weight as compared to insulin-sensitive patients. Thus the dose of 2 500 mg per day is effective as a weight-reducing agent, especially in patients with insulin resistance, but also in non-diabetic patients without insulin resistance. Thus novel aspects of medical treatment of obesity have been discovered by these authors”.

Congratulations to the winners!

We are already looking forward to choosing next year’s winner from the wealth of world class papers published in this journal. There is no formal application procedure, all original papers published in 2014 will be considered for the 2015 Thieme Award for the Best Original Paper.···

Dr. Regina Wenzel
Publishing Editor
Georg Thieme Verlag

• References

• 1 Seifarth C, Schehler B, Schneider HJ. Effectiveness of metformin on weight loss in non-diabetic individuals with obesity. Exp Clin Endocrinol Diabetes 2013; 212: 27-31