A new study finds that popular weight loss and obesity drugs, Ozempic and Vegovy, can help people stop drinking alcohol. The study was published in JAMA Psychiatry on Wednesday. In a study of nearly 228,000 people with alcohol use disorder in Sweden, researchers found that those taking a GLP-1 drug like semaglutide were less likely to be hospitalized for alcohol-related problems, according to a report by NBC News. The chances of that happening were slim.

“The available pharmacologic treatments for AUD are not very good, and recurrence is really common,” said Alex DiFelicantonio, an assistant professor at Virginia Tech’s Fralin Biomedical Research Institute.

“I see a lot of patients who don’t have good results with our medications and who are desperate for help to overcome their addiction,” said study leader Dr. Markku Lahtinvuo, a psychiatric researcher at Niuvanniemi Hospital in Finland. We really need more tools in the toolbox.”

For this study, Lahtinvuo and his team looked at the medical records of 228,000 people in Sweden who were diagnosed with alcohol use disorder from 2006 to 2023. All the people in the study also had obesity or type 2 diabetes. The authors also say that 60% of participants were hospitalized for an alcohol use disorder at some point during the study period.

About 75,000 people in the study used some type of medication to treat alcohol use disorder. Among that group, the team documented nearly 30,000 hospitalizations. People taking the GLP-1 drug had a much lower rate of alcohol-related hospitalization.

Of the nearly 4,300 people in the study who used semaglutide — the ingredient in Ozempic and Vegovy — about 220 were hospitalized for alcohol use disorder. Other people in the study were taking older GLP-1 drugs, including liraglutide and dulaglutide, and they also had fewer hospitalizations.

Hospitalization is an imperfect measure of determining the effect of medications on alcohol use disorder, but experts said it’s a good place to start. “Someone would need to be hospitalized because of alcohol withdrawal or poisoning, which is a very extreme outcome,” DiFelicantonio said.

He said hospital data is widely available and can help researchers determine which drugs may work for different types of addiction and which clinical trials they should run first. .

Growing research suggests that GLP-1 agonists are particularly at risk for alcohol addiction. Christian Hendershott, director of clinical research at the University of Southern California Institute for Addiction Science, said the fact that the new study only included people with alcohol use disorders provides a better understanding of how drug addiction occurs. How effective medicines can be for people with.

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