BLACKSBURG — Ozempic and other drugs used to treat Type 2 diabetes may also be used to treat alcohol use disorder, according to researchers at the Fralin Biomedical Research Institute at Virginia Tech-Carilion.
Since drugs such as semaglutide, better known as Ozempic, and tirzepatide started to be widely prescribed to treat diabetes, some have taken to social media to discuss their experience of losing the desire to drink alcohol.
From 2009 to 2023, there have been 1,580 posts on the social media platform Reddit discussing the subject of alcohol use and diabetes medication.
Where researchers at Fralin began was by surveying all of these posts, eliminating any that were under 100 characters long, and determining how many users had self-reported reduced drinking and cravings for alcohol as a result of using either semaglutide or tirzepatide.
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The survey found that 71% of the posts discussed reduced cravings and reduced consumption of alcohol.
The second phase involved recruiting 153 individuals who self-reported having obesity and being diagnosed with Type 2 diabetes, as well as, to at least some extent, drinking alcohol. About a third of these participants were in a control group, as in not prescribed either semaglutide or tirzepatide for treatment.
The results of that study showed that alcohol consumption was significantly reduced in people who were prescribed one of the two drugs.
Alexandra DiFeliceantonio, an assistant professor at the Fralin Biomedical Research Institute and one of the organizers of the study, said that the findings could be very significant in the world of addiction treatment.
“We don’t really have a good treatment for alcohol use disorder,” DiFeliceantonio said. “It’s a disorder that is prone to relapse.”
There are only three drugs currently approved by the FDA to treat alcoholism, disulfiram, which renders the body unable to process ethanol, naltrexone, which works to reduce cravings, and acamprosate, used to treat withdrawal symptoms.
None of these drugs, according to DiFeliceantonio, have been shown to be very effective in treating alcohol use disorder in the long-term.
“It’s not leading people to maintain abstinence,” DiFeliceantonio said.
In 2019, about 14.5 million people in the United States had alcohol use disorder, according to a study by Yale Medicine.
Several recent studies have shown that alcohol consumption has been on the rise in the U.S. since the COVID-19 pandemic, and that the increased consumption has not yet been curbed since pandemic restrictions were removed.
The possibility of having a new treatment available for people struggling to stop relying on alcohol has prompted a lot of new research in more places than just Fralin, and the organizers of the study hope to see it expanded in the near future.
The researchers still don’t know much about the exact mechanism whereby drugs such as Ozempic reduce alcohol cravings. DiFeliceantonio said that she hopes Fralin researchers will be allowed to hold more randomized controlled trials in the future, and expand the demographics involved, as most of the participants in the self-reporting trial were white and female, and more research will be needed to see if race or sex play a role in the results.
Warren Bickel, a behavioral health research professor at Fralin and another leader of this study, said that he hopes to add what he can to the ongoing research into these drugs being conducted around the world.
“Although evidence supporting the use of these medications for alcohol use disorder is growing, the field still needs to learn considerably more about them, particularly in identifying the underlying mechanisms. We plan to contribute to that effort,” Bickel said.