People taking the diet drug known as Ozempic have found that it also reduces other addictive behaviours such as smoking – now scientists are beginning to wonder whether they might have stumbled on a ‘cure’ for smoking.
Smoking is the biggest cause of cancer, but the mechanism by which the brain becomes addicted to chemicals in tobacco such as nicotine is imperfectly understood.
It’s often argued that addiction in itself is a personality disorder rather than a chemical dependency – that people who are addicted to, say, alcohol or tobacco, are equally like to become addicted to shopping, or gambling. But some people taking the drug Ozempic as a weight loss aid say they have also stopped excessive drinking, smoking, shopping, and even nail biting, suggesting that addiction has a chemical mechanism.
The drug semaglutide, marketed as Wegovy or Ozempic, is prescribed as a weight loss aid – the idea is that it suppresses appetite, so you feel full for longer and are less likely to eat more. But in the US, patients prescribed semaglutide as a weight loss aid have found that they are also losing other addictive behaviours such as excessive shopping or drinking alcohol.
Addictive
Christian Hendershot, a psychiatrist at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill School of Medicine, says that semaglutide and its chemical relatives seem to work, at least in animals, against an unusually broad array of addictive drugs. In humans, anti-addiction treatments tend to be specific, such as methadone for opioids, or bupropion for smoking. But scientists now suspect that semaglutide could be more widely useful, altering the brain’s fundamental ‘reward circuitry’ which governs addictive/compulsive behaviour.
Semaglutide was originally developed as a treatment for diabetes. It prompts the pancreas to release insulin by mimicking a hormone called GLP-1, or glucagon-like peptide 1. Doctors noticed that patients on drugs of this type also lost weight, an unintended but welcome side effect.
The theory is that GLP-1 may affect more than just the pancreas, in some way slowing the passage of food through the stomach and regulating blood sugar levels. But if it also affects addictive behaviours other than eating, it’s suggested that it may also have a direct affect on the brain, somehow reducing the ‘hit’ of reward hormone dopamine. Experiments on animals have rendered promising results, though when small studies have been done on humans, the results have varied with individuals. Experts say that semaglutide, if it works at all for human addiction, might end up more effective in some people than others.
