Can Ozempic help drug addicts, too? A mega new study suggests it might.

Weight-loss and diabetes drugs like Ozempic and Mounjaro could be used to treat drug and alcohol addiction in the future — according to the first large-scale study — but more research is needed.
An analysis of 1.3 million health records found these types of drugs reduced the instances of drug or alcohol overdoses. In people with alcoholism, rates of alcohol intoxication were 50 percent lower in those taking these types of medicines than for people who didn’t, while among people with opioid addiction, overdose rates were 40 percent lower in those taking these drugs versus those who didn’t.
The study, published in the journal Addiction on Thursday, saw researchers trawl a United States database of electronic health records to look for people with either an addiction to opioids or alcohol and who were also prescribed treatment for obesity or diabetes.
They found 8,103 people with a history of opioid use disorder who also had a prescription for obesity or diabetes drugs. The study also included more than 817,000 people with a history of alcohol use disorder, 5,621 of whom had a similar prescription.
The medicines analyzed in the study included drugs such as Novo Nordisk’s Wegovy and Ozempic and Lilly’s Mounjaro.
The results reveal “the possibilities of a novel therapeutic pathway in substance use treatment,” the authors, from Loyola University Chicago, state. But they caution that while the results are “promising,” they highlight the need for further research, particularly prospective clinical trials.
Until now, most of the existing research into using these types of drugs — known as GLP-1s and GIPs — to treat substance use disorders looked at its effects on animals, or were only small clinical trials. 
But despite the promising results, Matt Field, a professor of psychology at the University of Sheffield, issued a note of caution over the study.
He said its findings relate largely to “very extreme instances of substance intoxication,” like overdoses.
“Those outcomes are very different from the outcomes used when researchers test new treatments for addiction, in which case we might look at whether the treatment helps people to stop taking the substance altogether (complete abstinence), or if it helps people to reduce the amount of substance they consume, or how often they consume it,” he said. “Those things could not be measured in this study.”
This leaves open the possibility that while Ozempic may (for reasons currently unknown) prevent people from taking so much alcohol or heroin that they overdose and end up in hospital, “it may not actually help them to reduce their substance use, or to abstain altogether,” he said.
He goes on to say that one of the trials mentioned in the paper reported that a similar medication “did not reduce the number of heavy drinking days compared with placebo.”
Early this year, Ozempic-maker Novo Nordisk said it will start assessing the effects of semaglutide, the active ingredient in the drug, on alcohol consumption.