{"id":41962,"date":"2026-03-05T07:15:00","date_gmt":"2026-03-05T15:15:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.lifeandnews.com\/articles\/?p=41962"},"modified":"2026-03-06T12:23:24","modified_gmt":"2026-03-06T20:23:24","slug":"glp%e2%80%911-drugs-may-fight-addiction-across-every-major-substance-according-to-a-study-of-600000-people","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.lifeandnews.com\/articles\/glp%e2%80%911-drugs-may-fight-addiction-across-every-major-substance-according-to-a-study-of-600000-people\/","title":{"rendered":"GLP\u20111 drugs may fight addiction across every major substance, according to a study of 600,000 people"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Ziyad Al-Aly<\/a>, Washington University in St. Louis<\/a><\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

A patient of mine, a veteran who had tried to quit smoking for over a decade, told me that after he started a GLP-1 drug for his diabetes<\/a>, he lost interest in cigarettes. He didn\u2019t use a patch. He didn\u2019t set a quit date. He simply lost interest. It happened without effort.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Another patient on one of these drugs for weight loss told me that alcohol had lost its pull \u2013 after years of failed attempts to quit.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

People struggling with many addictions, ranging from opioids to gambling, are reporting similar experiences<\/a> in clinics, on social media and around dinner tables. None of them started these drugs to quit. This pattern of people losing their cravings across a broad range of addictive substances has no precedent in medicine.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

But my patients were giving me an important clue. People taking GLP-1 drugs often talk about \u201cfood noise\u201d vanishing: the constant mental chatter about food that dominated their days simply goes quiet. But my patients were reporting that it wasn\u2019t just food: They were noticing that the preoccupation with smoking, drinking and using drugs that drives people back despite their best intentions to stop was going quiet too.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

As a physician<\/a> whose patients are often on GLP-1 drugs, and as a scientist who works on answering pressing public health questions<\/a> \u2013 from long COVID to medication safety<\/a> \u2013 I saw a problem hiding in plain sight: Many addictions have no approved treatment. The few medications that exist are massively underutilized, and none works across all substances. The idea that a drug already taken by millions might do what no addiction treatment has done before was too important to ignore.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

My team and I set out to test whether GLP-1 drugs \u2013 medications like semaglutide (Ozempic and Wegovy) and tirzepatide (Mounjaro and Zepbound), originally developed for diabetes<\/a> and then approved for obesity<\/a> \u2013 could do what no existing addiction treatment does: curb craving itself.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Our evidence strongly suggests they can<\/a>. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Biological basis of cravings<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

The hormone that these drugs mimic \u2013 GLP-1 \u2013 is not only produced in the gut. It is also active in the brain, where the receptors it binds to cluster in regions governing reward, motivation and stress<\/a> \u2013 the same circuitry that gets hijacked by addiction<\/a>. At therapeutic doses, GLP-1 drugs cross the blood-brain barrier and dampen dopamine signaling<\/a> in the brain\u2019s core reward center, making addictive substances less rewarding<\/a>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

GLP-1 drugs seem to inhibit cravings for several different substances in multiple animal models. For instance, rodents given GLP-1 drugs drink less alcohol<\/a>, self-administer less cocaine<\/a> and show less interest in nicotine<\/a>. When researchers gave semaglutide to green vervet monkeys \u2013 primates that voluntarily drink alcohol much like humans do \u2013 the animals drank less<\/a> without showing signs of nausea or changes in water intake. This suggests the drug lowered the reward value of alcohol rather than making the animals feel sick.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

From animals to people<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

To find out whether these drugs have a similar effect on people<\/a>, we turned to the electronic health records of more than 600,000 patients with Type 2 diabetes at the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs \u2013 one of the largest health care databases in the world.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

We designed a study that applied the rigor of randomized controlled trials<\/a> \u2013 the gold standard in medicine \u2013 to real-world data. We compared people who started GLP-1 drugs to people who did not, adjusting for differences in health history, demographics and other factors, and followed both groups for three years.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

My team and I asked two questions: For people already struggling with addiction, did the drugs reduce overdoses, drug-related hospitalizations and deaths? And for people with no prior substance use disorder, did GLP-1 drugs reduce their risk of developing one across all major addictive substances: alcohol, opioids, cocaine, cannabis and nicotine?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

What we found was striking. In the group already struggling with addiction, there were 50% fewer deaths due to substance use among those taking GLP-1 drugs compared with those who were not. We also found 39% fewer overdoses, 26% fewer drug-related hospitalizations and 25% fewer suicide attempts. Over three years, this translated to roughly 12 fewer serious events in total per 1,000 people using GLP-1 drugs \u2013 including two fewer deaths.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Reductions of this magnitude are rare in addiction medicine \u2013 and what\u2019s remarkable is that the finding came from drugs initially designed for diabetes, later repurposed for obesity and never intended to treat addiction.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The drugs also appeared to prevent addiction from developing in the first place. Among people with no prior substance use disorder, those taking GLP-1 drugs had an 18% lower risk of developing alcohol use disorder, a 25% lower risk of opioid use disorder and an approximately 20% lower risk of cocaine and nicotine dependence. Over three years, this translated to roughly six to seven fewer new diagnoses per 1,000 GLP-1 users.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

With tens of millions of people already using GLP-1 drugs, the reductions in deaths, overdoses, hospitalizations and new diagnoses could translate into thousands of prevented serious events each year.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\n