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Kathy Schwartz had been sober for 10 years, but battling cravings was a daily struggle. “They were always in my head,” she said. But last June, the cravings subsided.
After being prescribed the weight-loss drug semaglutide, she not only lost nearly 30 kilos over 10 months, but also eliminated her desire for drinks or pills. “The cravings went away, and I didn’t realize that was a side effect,” Schwartz says. Amazingly, the depression and anxiety that had previously hit her in waves also subsided.
Schwartz isn’t the only one to have had this experience: New research is showing that semaglutide drugs like Ozempic and Wegovy, as well as other diabetes and weight-loss drugs that mimic gut hormones released after eating, can have surprising benefits for brain and mental health.
Though it’s still early days, evidence suggests that these drugs could potentially be repurposed to treat depression, anxiety, addiction, and even certain eating disorders, as well as neurological diseases like Parkinson’s and Alzheimer’s. What’s more, these benefits appear to be mediated not simply through weight loss, but through a direct effect on the brain.
Drugs like Ozempic date back to the 1970s and 1980s, when researchers discovered that injecting a gut hormone called glucagon-like peptide-1 (GLP-1) into the intestinal tract of rodents could stimulate insulin production.
