Semaglutide, the active ingredient in popular weight loss drugs Wegovy and Ozempic, may help people quit smoking, too. New research published Monday has found evidence that semaglutide can prevent or treat people’s nicotine dependence. More study will be needed to confirm this potential benefit, however.
Semaglutide and other newer GLP-1 drugs have proven to be substantially more effective at helping people lose weight than diet and exercise alone. But scientists at Case Western Reserve University, led by researcher Rong Xu, have been studying the possible effects of semaglutide and similar drugs that might extend beyond treating weight loss and type 2 diabetes. Earlier this month, for instance, they published a study finding that GLP-1 drugs may be able to reduce the overall risk of obesity-related cancer in people with diabetes. Their new research, published in the Annals of Internal Medicine, looked at the connection between semaglutide use and nicotine use disorder.
The researchers analyzed the health records of over 200,000 diabetes patients after they were newly prescribed one of several antidiabetes medications, including nearly 6,000 people who were prescribed semaglutide. They found that semaglutide users were noticeably less likely to be diagnosed with tobacco use disorder or to be given treatments for it (i.e., drugs or counseling) over the following year. This pattern held true when the researchers only looked at people with or without obesity as well.
“While there are effective medications to support people if they wish to stop smoking, not everyone responds to them,” said Xu, a biomedical informatics professor at Case Western, in a statement from the university. “As a result of the high relapse rates, alternative medications to help people stop smoking are needed.”
The team’s findings alone cannot prove that semaglutide and similar drugs can help treat tobacco addiction. But anecdotes and some studies (including one by the same scientists published in May) have increasingly suggested that GLP-1 drugs can temper harmful cravings caused by other vices such as alcohol and even gambling. As a result, scientists elsewhere have begun to test out semaglutide for alcohol use disorder in clinical trials (with early promising results so far)—a trend that should be followed with nicotine as well, the authors say. “These findings suggest the need for clinical trials to evaluate semaglutide’s potential for [tobacco use disorder] treatment,” they wrote in their paper.
From potentially preventing cancer to possibly keeping our brains sharper as we reach our later years, is there anything that semaglutide can’t do?
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