Fancy lunch is tomorrow, but thank you anyway! I'm off to see the new Bridget Jones later, can't wait.
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Weight-loss injections have been found to curb heavy drinking and could be used to treat alcoholism, according to a study.
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. It was the first randomised trial to assess the impact of the drugs on harmful drinking, after 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” in treatment, by dampening the brain cues that cause people to crave food and drink.
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A team at the University of North Carolina recruited 48 people with alcohol use disorder, the medical term for alcoholism, which is when people cannot stop drinking despite negative consequences. The participants were randomly assigned to two groups. Half received a weekly, low-dose injection of semaglutide, while the rest received placebo injections, all given during weekly clinic visits.
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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 they 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, the experts said.
The participants also underwent lab tests to see how much they chose to drink when given their favourite alcohol. At the beginning of the trial, before the injections, people were taken to a lab setting and could drink as much as they wanted over two hours.
Drugs such as semaglutide mimic a hormone to suppress the appetite
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This was repeated after the course of treatment, which found semaglutide led to a “medium-to-large” reduction. 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, who was the senior author of the study, said: “These data suggest the potential of semaglutide and similar drugs to fill an unmet need for the treatment of alcohol use disorder.”
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Semaglutide is part of a new class of medication called GLP-1 agonists, which mimic a hormone to suppress the appetite. They were initially created to treat diabetes, but have since been found to help obesity and heart disease, with scientists 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).
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Professor Sir Ian Gilmore, the chairman of the Alcohol Health Alliance UK, said: “We welcome any new research developments to help people with alcohol use disorders. Further research on the drug’s mechanism of action might also help to grow our understanding of the cause of alcohol dependence, which blights the lives of so many people, their families and their communities.”
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.”
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Matt Field, a professor of psychology at the University of Sheffield, said more research was needed, however, to see if the drugs could be used as a conventional treatment for alcohol use disorder. “It will be important to establish if semaglutide can also reduce alcohol consumption in people who are not obese, particularly given that many people who seek treatment for alcohol problems are underweight,” he said.
“It will also be important to consider if and how semaglutide can be incorporated into conventional treatment for alcohol use disorder which might include detoxification, counselling or talking therapies, other types of medications, and involvement with mutual aid groups such as Alcoholics Anonymous.