The active ingredient in Ozempic and Wegovy has once again proven to have health effects far outside of weight loss in a huge analysis linking it to lowered Alzheimer’s disease risk.
Looking at more than a million patient records, researchers at Case Western Reserve School of Medicine discovered that diabetic seniors on semaglutide were far less likely to develop Alzheimer’s than their counterparts who took other diabetes medications.
This effect was most stark when comparing semaglutide to the old-school diabetes injectable insulin, with patients on semaglutide showing a whopping 70 percent lowered risk of Alzheimer’s.
In the study, published in the journal Alzheimer’s and Dementia, the Case Western researchers led by biomedical informatics expert Rong Xu used medical records from patients over the age of 60 with Type 2 diabetes to run a randomized statistical analysis that mimics a clinical trial.
Specifically, the CWR team looked at three years of healthcare data for folks who had just begun taking diabetes drugs like insulin, Ozempic, and the GLP-1 drug liraglutide that’s sold under the brand name Victoza. Their goal: to see how well they fared over time, and to see if there were links to be drawn between their diabetes medications and their cognitive health outcomes.
In an interview with NBC about the findings, Xu said she was surprised that semaglutide outperformed even liraglutide, which has also been linked to slowed Alzheimer’s progression in a different recent study.
All the participants in the study had notably been prescribed Ozempic, which tops out at two milligrams per weekly injection, while its weight loss sister drug Wegovy can be prescribed at the slightly higher dose of 2.4 mg.
“If there is a higher dose form, are we going to see an even stronger effect?” Xu mused.
As the study’s introduction notes, there haven’t yet been clinical trials completed looking specifically into whether semaglutide can have a protective effect when it comes to Alzheimer’s disease — though Novo Nordisk, the makers of Ozempic and Wegovy, is currently conducting Stage 3 trials into that very subject.
“Our results indicate that further research into semaglutide’s use will need to be further investigated through randomized clinical trials,” Xu said in the school’s press release, “so alternative drugs can be tested as potential treatment for this debilitating illness.”
From potentially preventing Alzheimer’s to lowering the urge to drink and smoke, these drugs are proving time and again to be massive pharmaceutical game-changers — although the exact mechanism of why, as always, remains strikingly elusive.
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