Weight-loss jab found to help alcoholics drink 40pc less

Weight-loss injections curb heavy drinking and could be used to treat alcoholism, a study suggests.

(FILES) This photograph taken on February 23, 2023, in Paris, shows the anti-diabetic medication "Ozempic" (semaglutide) made by Danish pharmaceutical company "Novo Nordisk". Outgoing US President Joe Biden on November 26, 2024, to give millions more Americans access to weight loss drugs – but Donald Trump's incoming health chief looked set to shoot down the idea. Under the massive US public health insurance programs Medicare and Medicaid, drugs like Ozempic and Wegovy are, for the most part, only available for overweight people with diabetes or heart disease. (Photo by JOEL SAGET / AFP)

Weight-loss injections curb heavy drinking and could be used to treat alcoholism, a study suggests.

Patients reduced the number of alcoholic drinks they had by 41 per cent per week after being put on a low dose of semaglutide, the drug sold under the brand names Ozempic and Wegovy.

The first randomised trial to assess the impact of the drugs on harmful drinking follows anecdotal and observational reports that they reduced alcohol craving.

Experts said the “exciting” results suggested semaglutide was more effective than existing drugs to treat alcoholism and could “fill an unmet need” by affecting the brain’s cues that cause people to crave food and drink.

A University of North Carolina team recruited 48 people with alcohol use disorder – the medical term for alcoholism, defined as when people cannot stop drinking despite negative consequences.

Participants were randomly assigned to two groups; half received a weekly, low-dose injection of semaglutide, while the rest received placebo injections. For the next nine weeks, they completed a daily diary recording how much they drank and the strength of their alcohol cravings.

The semaglutide group recorded a 41 per cent reduction in the number of drinks consumed on each of their drinking days, and weekly alcohol cravings dropped by 40 per cent.

In the last four weeks of the trial, 40 per cent of the semaglutide group did not have any days of heavy drinking – defined as more than four alcoholic drinks – compared with just 20 per cent of the placebo group.

The groups did not differ in terms of how often they drank alcohol, just the quantity, suggesting that semaglutide works on the brain to reduce the pleasure people get from drinking. Participants who smoked also cut down on cigarettes if they were on semaglutide, according to the study, published in the journal JAMA Psychiatry.

Klara Klein, from the UNC School of Medicine, the senior author of the study, said the data showed “the potential of semaglutide and similar drugs to fill an unmet need for the treatment of alcohol use disorder”.

Commenting on the findings, Dr Stephen Burgess, of the University of Cambridge, said: “This is a small study, but an exciting one. It provides evidence that semaglutide treatment can reduce alcohol consumption, similar to how it has been shown to reduce food consumption and consequently body weight. The likely mechanistic pathway is by dampening brain cues that prompt an individual to crave both food and alcohol.”

Matt Field, a professor of psychology at the University of Sheffield, said more research was needed. “It will be important to establish if semaglutide can also reduce alcohol consumption in people who are not obese … given that many people who seek treatment for alcohol problems are underweight,” he said.

Semaglutide is part of a new class of medication called GLP-1 agonists, which mimic a hormone to suppress appetite. They were created to treat diabetes but have been found to fight obesity and heart disease, with scientists now investigating their use for chronic mental and physical diseases.

Figures published on February 5 showed deaths from alcohol in Britain have reached a record high.

The Office for National Statistics said there were 10,473 deaths from alcohol-specific causes in 2023, and the rate of alcohol-specific deaths for men remained around double the rate for women (21.9 and 10.3 deaths per 100,000 people respectively).

THE TIMES