From diabetes drug to elixir of life, Ozempic’s rise was arguably the single most phenomenal trend of 2023.
After demonstrating its effectiveness in controlling blood sugar and promoting weight reduction, scientists are now looking into Ozempic’s and similar drugs’ ability to treat a variety of other illnesses, such as liver disease, alcohol addiction, and a common cause of infertility.
The majority of the research on further applications for tirzepatide (found in Mounjaro and Zepbound) and semaglutide (found in Ozempic and Wegovy) is still in its early phases. Specifically, researchers are attempting to determine if these medications’ advantages are limited to helping patients lose weight or if they have other benefits that may be used to treat a far wider range of ailments, such as reducing bodily inflammation or calming obsessive thoughts in the brain.
“It’s like a snowball that turned into an avalanche,” Lindsay Allen, a health economist at Northwestern Medicine, told the New York Times.
Every new use for the weight-loss medications would inevitably propel them even more into blockbuster status for the manufacturers. Certain applications, such as those for sleep apnea and heart disease, which impact tens of millions of people each, have drawn attention from these businesses and have the potential to be particularly profitable.
One instance is alcoholism. Some Ozempic users claim that their pills cause them to desire to drink less or, in extreme situations, completely stop drinking. When taking these drugs, patients feel full, so they could become less interested in food and drink. According to some studies, these medications target areas of the brain that control hunger- and may also have an impact on compulsive behaviors that involve those brain regions, such as alcohol or stimulant use, smoking, gambling, or even biting one’s nails.
The polycystic ovary syndrome, which is frequently linked to infertility, is another such example. High testosterone levels are thought to play a role in PCOS by researchers. Since testosterone levels frequently drop in individuals with the illness when they lose weight, medications like Ozempic may be able to help patients’ hormones balance.
Further applications range from liver disease (medication like Ozempic helps patients lose weight and may also reduce the quantity of fat the liver stores) to cardiovascular disease (the risk of heart problems is decreased by losing weight, and medications may also lessen inflammation, responsible for plaque forming and blood clots), as well as sleep apnea (a condition most common among obese people) and kidney disease (losing weight lowers the risk of Type 2 diabetes and hypertension, two conditions that increase the risk of chronic kidney disease).
Researchers’ understanding of how these medications function in the body will improve as more data from these studies become available. However, one element is already very clear: they have the potential to completely transform medicine.
