r/science • u/Wagamaga • Feb 12 '25

Neuroscience The first clinical trial of its kind has found that semaglutide, distributed under the brand name Wegovy, cut the amount of alcohol people drank by about 40% and dramatically reduced people’s desire to drink

https://today.usc.edu/popular-weight-loss-diabetes-drug-shows-promise-in-reducing-cravings-for-alcohol/
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52

u/PennilessPirate Feb 12 '25

It’s kind of scary that we’re seeing all these amazing benefits from Ozempic as basically a “cure-all miracle” drug, but we don’t even know how it really works.

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u/JigglymoobsMWO Feb 12 '25

We know exactly the target it hits but we don't understand its diverse interconnected effects on the brain.

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u/orphan-cr1ppler Feb 12 '25

We understand the medication but not the brain, I guess.

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u/letitgo99 Feb 13 '25

If the brain were simple enough to understand, we'd be too simple to understand it.

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u/Persistentnotstable Feb 12 '25

Wait until you hear about Tylenol. I don't think we've fully figured out the mechanism of action there either

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u/RedditAddict6942O Feb 13 '25

They recently discovered that Tylenol doesn't just reduce pain. It reduces inhibition to risky behaviors as well. 

We don't really know what it's doing in there.

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u/bkdroid Feb 12 '25

Or anti-depressants

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u/kuroimakina Feb 12 '25

The truth is, there’s a SHITLOAD of medications that we only partially or even mostly understand how they work.

The human body is immensely complicated. We are seeing studies now that suggest our gut biome literally has huge impacts on our cognitive function. If you told someone 20 years ago that eating unhealthy could literally screw up your brain on a biological level, they would have looked at you like you were just exaggerating/being dramatic. Often times we might say “well, this medication decreases x hormone, which causes y effect,” but we have absolutely no idea why that hormone affects you the way it does.

It really puts a lot of modern medicine into perspective, at just how much knowledge needs to go into this stuff, and how much we still have yet to learn. The fact that we’ve gotten this far with medicine while still having so many mysteries about our body really bodes well for the future of medicine. We can make all things things while understanding half of why they work - imagine how effective our medications will be when we have a near full understanding of every function of the human body

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u/Providang PhD | Biology | Functional Morphology and Biomechanics Feb 13 '25

Wait til you hear about anesthesia... we only sort of got a good grasp on which pathways were targeted in 2019! https://www.cell.com/neuron/fulltext/S0896-6273(19)30296-X

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u/PennilessPirate Feb 12 '25

Is that not also kind of scary?

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u/heirbagger Feb 13 '25

We have not. The Erins did an excellent episode (but really? All their stuff is excellent.) on acetaminophen/paracetamol on their podcast, This Podcast Will Kill You. Cannot recommend this podcast enough.

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u/RedditAddict6942O Feb 13 '25

Not that scary. About 40% of drugs have unknown mechanism of action.

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u/Joatboy Feb 12 '25

You're right we don't know exactly how it works but I'd imagine we'd figure it out in a few years because the patents are running out sorta soon....

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u/DrXaos Feb 12 '25

That's understating the decades of science on these pathways. Scientists know a significant amount, but not entirely everything.

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u/Anth0n Feb 13 '25

GLP-1 is one of multiple hormones that act on energy balance neurons in the hypothalamus to reduce appetite and keep blood sugar normalized. People who are metabolically unwell are resistant to the hormone leptin. The neurons (AgRP and POMC) do not become resistant to GLP-1, so using these drugs stimulates the neurons and helps with both blood sugar regulation and appetite suppression.

Animal research has shown that the reason the drugs help with addiction is because they dampen activation of the mesolimbic dopamine pathway. Leptin acts similarly on the same pathway, which helps reduce food-seeking behavior. So there's a fascinating idea that substance use disorders may often have metabolic roots because they might be a side effect of increased food-seeking behavior, an inappropriate bodily adaptation to a nonexistent food shortage. I can provide sources and elaborate more if you're interested.