United States: If it can provide a sustainable solution to the rising obesity epidemic and its complications or bring down the requirement for ResMed’s continuous Positive Airway Pressure (PAP) therapy used to manage the signs of sleep apnea, then it is not astonishing in any way that at the present time, GLP-1 drugs are one of Wall Street’s most significant thematic investment recommendations for the current decade.
Researchers, however, have attributed new usage of these so-called ‘miracle drugs’, and the latest finding is that these can be used to control alcohol addiction habits.
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The GLP-1 hormone delays hunger and controls insulin and glucose release. This hormone is usually released after a meal and brings up the level of insulin production, thereby lowering blood glucose levels.
At the same time, the rate at which the stomach invokes a release of hormones that signal the small intestine to absorb their contents is slowed down, and this triggers the feeling of fullness or satiety, as wccftech.com reported.
Although the drugs containing GLP-1 agonists were once advertised as a cure for diabetes, dozens of the drugs that the agency has approved are sold as a distinct obesity remedy.
At first, many drugs utilizing GLP-1 agonists were advertised as being a cure for diabetes; however, now dozens of them have been marketed as a specific type of anti-obesity remedy.
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Novo Nordisk uses semaglutide as the company’s proprietary GLP-1 agonist in drugs marketed under the Ozempic and Wegovy brands; the first one targets type-2 diabetes, while the second product essentially targets obesity.
While Novo Nordisk currently has few other GLP-1 drugs in development that are still in the pipeline which are ingestible and that work with GLP-1 and Amylin agonists to provide better efficacy, Wegovy, and Ozempic are still the main products that Novo Nordisk has right now to manage both obesity and diabetes.
This takes us to the heart of the subject. Since medicines like GLP-1 agonists helped reduce nicotine dependency, a group of researchers recently attempted to study how receptive the hormone is in dealing with alcoholism, as wccftech.com reported.
Correctly, the researchers administered a random group of male vervet monkeys with repeated doses of the semaglutide GLP-1 agonist (up to 0.05 mg/kg) or placebo twice per week within two weeks.
The monkey had been taught to drink alcohol for ten days before the beginning of the treatment period, but during these two weeks, no alcohol was offered to it.
Subsequently, for the next 20 working days, subordination of alcohol was made as investigators maintained the semaglutide treatment regime of three times a week and the placebo treatment twice a week.
The results of this study revealed that monkeys that were treated with semaglutide consumed less alcohol in contrast to the control group after the two-week period of abstinence from alcohol, as per the study.
However, this study considered the sample of only mammals, so the GLP-1 agonists could perhaps hold a less efficient grip on alcoholism in humans. It does, however, open a new line of work for researchers to engage in if they wish to continue engaging in this type of research.