Weight loss drugs may reduce people’s desire to exercise
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Semaglutide, found in medicines such as Ozempic and Wigovy, reduces the amount of movement in mice. This finding suggests that these weight loss drugs may reduce people’s motivation to exercise.
Semaglutide helps treat type 2 diabetes and obesity by mimicking a hormone called GLP-1, which regulates blood sugar and suppresses appetite. GLP-1 also suppresses activity in brain areas involved in reward processing and craving. This may explain why people taking semaglutide-based drugs no longer find eating as rewarding or pleasurable as they did before taking the drug. This is also probably why some studies show that semaglutide may also be helpful in treating substance use disorders.
Ralph DiLeone and colleagues at Yale University wanted to know whether semaglutide also affects other rewarding behaviors, such as exercise, which is known to improve mood and memory. So they gave seven mice semaglutide and an equal number a placebo and measured how far the mice ran on an exercise wheel each day.
On average, patients treated with semaglutide ran about half the distance as those given a placebo. This suggests that motivation for exercise may be low.
To further test this, the researchers administered semaglutide to another group of 15 mice and a placebo for five days to another group of similarly sized mice, and investigated their willingness to exercise on a wheel. did. But this time, the exercise wheel locked up periodically while the animal was running on it. To release the lock, the mouse had to press a lever with its nose. Each time the wheel locked, it became progressively more difficult to unlock, requiring the mouse to press the lever many more times. “Eventually they quit,” says DiLeone, who presented these findings at the Society for Neuroscience meeting in Chicago on October 7. “We call that their breakpoint. It’s a proxy for how willing they are to access the wheel.”
The maximum number of lever presses in mice treated with semaglutide was, on average, 25% lower than control animals. The researchers repeated the experiment in obese mice and found similar results.
Taken together, these findings suggest that semaglutide-based drugs, such as Ozempic and Wigovy, may reduce motivation to exercise, similar to reducing food and drug cravings. Masu. But there was no evidence that this applied to humans, DiLeone said. This could be because most of the data on Wegovy and Ozempic comes from people participating in weight-loss programs that include exercise, he says.
Still, these findings highlight that these drugs can interfere with positive as well as negative behaviors. “[This]data suggests that there are still motivated behaviors that we haven’t yet explored that could potentially be modified[with semaglutide],” said Karolina Skibicka of Pennsylvania State University. says.
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