People taking weight-loss drugs Ozempic and Wegovy report a dampening of the urge to drink. Here's how the drugs curb cravings and what that could mean for helping treat addiction.
So why would a weight-loss drug do this? Turns out, these drugs don't just work on blood sugar."They also work in your brain," says"The mechanism in the brain that regulates overeating overlaps with those responsible for the development and maintenance of addiction, including alcohol disorder," he says.Studies in animals, as well as a few in people, offer tantalizing clues to how this mechanism works for both food and alcohol.
So you don't really feel like another bite of cookie, or as J. Paul Grayson said,"I didn't feel like guzzling. I just really felt like sipping it." But NIDA's Leggio advises against this off-label use of Ozempic and Wegovy."It's too early," he says. Ozempic may not work against alcohol for everyone, including people who don't have obesity., looking at whether another GLP-1 drug could treat alcohol use disorder in people in general, as compared to cognitive behavioral therapy. This drug, called exenatide, isn't as potent as semaglutide at inducing weight-loss or penetrating inside the brain.
And he notes, in the end, maybe a newer version of the GLP-1 drugs might work better for treating addictions than diabetes.
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