According to the study, Ozempic shows promise for treating alcohol and drug abuse

Ozempic, Mounjaro and similar drugs for type 2 diabetes and weight loss could also help people struggling with addiction, according to a new study.

The researchers found that people addicted to alcohol who also had a prescription for Ozempic or similar drugs had a 50% lower rate of binge drinking, compared to people who did not take the drugs. And people with opioid use disorder who were taking the drugs had a 40% lower rate of opioid overdose.

The findings appear this week in the journal addiction.

The impact these drugs appeared to have on reducing addictive behaviors was surprising, says Fares Qeadan, associate professor of biostatistics at Loyola University Chicago and lead author of the study.

“Although we hypothesized that these medications might affect craving and reward-seeking behavior, the observed reduction in severe outcomes for people with opioid and alcohol use disorders suggests a broader than expected protective effect Qeadan said in an email to NPR.

The active ingredients in Ozempic (semaglutide) and Mounjaro (tirzepatide) work by mimicking hormones in the body that help regulate blood sugar and make you feel full after you eat.

Prescriptions for these and similar drugs have skyrocketed in recent years, leading to growing anecdotal reports that the drugs can curb not only food cravings, but also alcohol and other addictive behaviors.

To conduct the study, researchers at Loyola University Chicago analyzed the health records of more than 1.3 million people with alcohol and substance use disorders over an 8-year period from 2014

The study results add “a lot of promising evidence that we could eventually use these treatments for substance use disorder,” says Christian Hendershot, director of clinical research at the Institute of Addiction Science at the University of Southern California. He did not participate in the study.

Over the past decade, a large number of preclinical studies in rats and mice have shown that these drugs can reduce alcohol consumption and other addictive behaviors, he says.

Hendershot notes that several recent studies have looked at patient records and found links between these medications and reduced use of health codes associated with addictive behavior.

Researchers have known for many years that the brain mechanism that regulates food-seeking behaviors overlaps with the mechanism that regulates why some people develop addiction, says Dr. Lorenzo Leggio, clinical director of the National Institute of ‘Drug abuse.

Scientists still don’t know exactly how Ozempic and similar drugs work, he adds. “We believe that these drugs are active in the brain and, similar to their actions on food, they also curb their craving for addictive drugs,” says Leggio.

Hendershot notes that these drugs are very effective at inducing satiety, which is why they work for weight loss. The researchers suspect that the satiety signal may also help people decrease substance use once they start these medications, he says.

“Another potential mechanism is that these drugs tend to reduce the reward value or hedonic value of highly pleasurable foods and addictive drugs,” Hendershot explains.

Study author Fares Qeadan says the new findings “offer an exciting direction for future research” into how Ozempic and similar drugs could one day be used as part of the addiction treatment toolkit .

While Hendershot agrees that the drugs can prove useful in treating addiction, he says it’s too soon to endorse this type of off-label use. He notes that the new findings were based on observational data, so they can’t prove cause and effect. First, he says, we need more research based on rigorously conducted randomized controlled clinical trials.

Leggio says the good news is that there are several clinical trials now underway, including one he’s overseeing at the NIH, that are examining how these drugs affect people’s drinking and substance use habits.

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