Ozempic shows promise for treating alcohol and drug abuse, study finds

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

Researchers found that people addicted to alcohol who also had a prescription for Ozempic or similar medications had a 50% lower rate of binging on alcohol, compared to people who were not on the medications. And people with opioid use disorder who were taking the medications had a 40% lower rate of opioid overdose.

The findings appear this week in the journal Addiction.

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

“While we hypothesized that these medications might impact cravings and reward-seeking behavior, the observed reduction in severe outcomes for individuals with opioid and alcohol use disorders suggests a broader, more protective effect than anticipated,” Qeadan said in an email to NPR.

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

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

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

The study results add to “a lot of promising evidence that we might eventually be able to utilize these treatments for substance use disorder,” says Christian Hendershot, director of clinical research at the University of Southern California Institute for Addiction Science. He was not involved in the study.

Over the last decade, a large number of preclinical studies in rats and mice have shown that these medications 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 a reduced use of health codes associated with addictive behavior.

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

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

Hendershot notes that these medications are highly effective at inducing satiety and that’s why they work for weight loss. Researchers suspect that satiety signal may also be helping people decrease substance use once they start these medications, he says.

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

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

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

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