February 13, 2025 — Early on after semaglutide captured public attention, people started noticing that the drug was not only helping people reduce excessive weight, it seemed to reduce the desire for drinking alcohol. But until now, all we’ve had to support this idea were anecdotes and retrospective observational studies. Yesterday, JAMA Psychiatry published an RCT offering stronger evidence […]
October 19, 2024 — New observational research in Addiction suggests that the rates of drug and alcohol use might be lower by as much as half when people are taking GLP-1s. Specifically, half as many people with alcohol use disorder had episodes of intoxication if they were taking a GLP-1. Among people with opioid use disorder, the rate of […]
July 11, 2023 — The emergence of advanced medicines for obesity is teaching us a lot about the overlapping mechanisms that drive desires for alcohol, food, and more. Desire, it seems, is more than just a feeling. It is the product of biological processes that our bodies regulate. But those processes can clearly go astray, and desire for food, […]
June 5, 2023 — One of the neat tricks of semaglutide and tirzepatide is their unexpected ability to shift the frames of bias through which we look at obesity and human behavior. Neuroscience and behavioral psychology have long told us the human desire for food is not purely a matter of choice. Yet in addressing obesity, weight bias and […]
March 8, 2023 — We would classify this as a report of a side effect. But it’s not really an adverse event. It seems that for some people, the use of semaglutide has prompted less alcohol use. In the New York Times, Dani Blum describes the experience of one patient: “In August 2022, Eva Monsen’s endocrinologist prescribed Ozempic [semaglutide] […]
