By Meg Tirrell, CNN
(CNN) — Evidence is mounting that the wildly popular weight-loss medicines known as GLP-1s may also hold potential for treating addiction, and the field may be on the verge of obtaining desperately needed answers through more study.
The drugs, approved to treat diabetes and obesity as Ozempic, Wegovy, Mounjaro and Zepbound, are used by millions of Americans. They help people lose weight by working in both the gut and the brain, acting on digestion, insulin and appetite, helping quiet cravings and what users describe as “food noise.”
So named for the GLP-1 hormone they mimic, the medicines have also shown success in cardiovascular disease, heart failure, sleep apnea and kidney disease. Addiction may be one of their next frontiers, an area where only small fractions of patients currently receive medications as treatment.
“If these drugs turn out to be safe and efficacious for treatment of substance-use disorder, because they are so broadly used for other reasons in our society, they would just automatically, de facto, become the most widely prescribed pharmacotherapy for addiction,” said Dr. W. Kyle Simmons, a professor of pharmacology and physiology at Oklahoma State University who studies GLP-1s in addiction. “We don’t have all the data yet, but it’s sure trending in the right direction, and that is a hopeful sign.”
Much of the research on the medicines in addiction so far has been in animals, work that’s helped elucidate how they might act on reward systems in the brain. There have also been a number of studies examining impacts on addiction in real-world use of the drugs prescribed for other diseases, as well as countless anecdotes of people’s personal experiences.
And although some smaller clinical trials have added to the drugs’ promise in areas such as alcohol-use disorder, larger ones are needed to confirm their effect, said Dr. Daniel Drucker, a pioneer of GLP-1 research at the University of Toronto.
Those answers may finally be close, after a slower start for interest and investment in trials of GLP-1 drugs in addiction. Now, Simmons said, “it’s exploding, frankly. There are a handful of well-designed, well-powered [trials] that are going to be reading out in the next six months, specifically with alcohol-use disorder and GLP-1.”
A glimpse into the VA
Until then, studies such as a newly published analysis of medical records continue to add to the hope.
Using databases from the US Department of Veterans Affairs, researchers at the Washington University School of Medicine