Blockbuster drugs Ozempic and Wegovy could help people reduce your alcohol consumptionnew research published Wednesday in JAMA Psychiatry suggests.

In a study of about 228,000 people in Sweden with alcohol use disorders, researchers found that people who took a GLP-1 drug like semaglutide were less likely to be hospitalized for related problems. to alcohol.

In the United States, just over 28 million adults are addicted to alcohol, according to the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism.

However, only three drugs are approved to treat it.

“The available pharmacological treatments for AUD are not very good and relapses are very common,” said Alex DiFeliceantonio, assistant professor at the Fralin Biomedical Research Institute at Virginia Tech.

Study leader Dr Markku Lähteenvuo, a psychiatry researcher at Niuvanniemi Hospital in Finland, said: “I see so many patients who are not getting good results from the drugs we have and who are desperate to need help. help with their addiction. We really need more tools in the toolbox.

GLP-1 drugs – the class of drugs that includes semaglutide and other popular drugs like tirzepatide – have shown potential for treating addiction.

A clinical trial published in 2022 found that an older GLP-1 drug called exenatide reduced alcohol consumption, but only in those who had both alcohol use disorder and obesity. Several other studies examined alcohol drinking habits among people taking GLP-1 medications and not suffering from alcohol use disorders.

In the new study, Lähteenvuo and his team examined the medical records of 228,000 Swedish people diagnosed with alcohol use disorder from 2006 to 2023. All people in the study also had obesity or type 2 diabetes.

Approximately 60% of participants were hospitalized for alcohol use disorders at some point during the study period.

About 75,000 people in the study used some type of medication to treat alcohol use disorder. Among this group, the team documented approximately 30,000 hospitalizations. (Researchers counted the total number of hospitalizations, meaning each count does not necessarily represent an individual person. Some people may have been hospitalized multiple times.)

Alcohol-related hospitalizations were much lower among people taking a GLP-1 medication.

For the roughly 4,300 people in the study who used semaglutide — the ingredient in Ozempic and Wegovy — there were about 220 hospitalizations for alcohol use disorders. Other study participants were taking older GLP-1 medications, including liraglutide and dulaglutide, and also had fewer hospitalizations.

Using hospitalization to determine the effects of drugs on alcohol use disorders is an imperfect measure, but experts say it’s a good place to start.

“Alcohol withdrawal or poisoning would be the reason a person would need to be hospitalized, which is a pretty extreme outcome,” DiFeliceantonio said.

A study by the American Association for the Study of Liver Diseases found that beer drinkers generally have less healthy lifestyles than those who prefer wine, spirits or a combination of types of alcohol.

But hospital data is widely available and can help researchers determine which drugs may be effective for different types of addiction and which clinical trials they should conduct first, she added.

Growing research shows that GLP-1 agonists deserve closer examination, particularly for alcohol dependence.

“We have known for some time from animal studies that GLP-1 receptor agonists reduce alcohol consumption and the motivation to consume alcohol,” said Christian Hendershot, director of clinical research at the Institute of Addiction Sciences at the University of Southern California.

The fact that the new study included only people with alcohol use disorders provides better information about the effectiveness of medications for people with substance dependence, he added.

How a diabetes drug could treat addiction is still a mystery.

One theory is that its effects might have something to do with the drugs’ ability to induce feelings of fullness. It could reduce drug and alcohol cravings in the same way that medications work on cravingsHendershot said.

“They can also reduce the rewarding effects of drugs,” he said.

There are other theories as well. Lähteenvuo said it might have something to do with the sugar in the alcohol. GLP-1 drugs, he says, make sugary drinks less appealing.

Newer GLP-1 drugs, such as semaglutide and tirzepatide, enter the brain in different ways. old versions that have been studiedand going forward, it will be important to test both, DiFeliceantonio said.

Hendershot said that while the drugs are very safe for people with obesity and type 2 diabetes, they could pose big safety risks for people without obesity or type 2 diabetes, including loss of weight they carry.

Early research also explored GLP-1 drugs for nicotine and opioid addiction, with mixed results. So far, the clearest results have come from studies of alcohol dependence, but there is still much to understand.

“Currently, we only have three FDA-approved medications to treat alcohol use disorder. This pales in comparison to drugs approved to treat other diseases,” Hendershot said. “Anything we can do to study other drugs, including GLP-1 agonists, is critically important to our field. »

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