A box of Novo Nordisk’s Ozempic sits in a pharmacy in London, England, on March 8, 2024.
Holly Adams | Reuters
Novo NordiskThe company’s blockbuster diabetes drug Ozempic may reduce the risk of opioid overdose in certain patients, showing potential as an alternative treatment for opioid use disorder, according to a new study published Wednesday.
Ozempic’s active ingredient, semaglutide, is associated with a “substantially lower” risk of opioid overdose compared with other diabetes medications in people diagnosed with both type 2 diabetes and opioid use disorder, according to a paper published in JAMA Network Open.
The findings suggest Ozempic could be a tool to combat the ongoing opioid epidemic in the United States, which was declared a public health emergency in 2017. Currently, there are three medications that are effective at preventing overdoses from opioid use disorder, but some patients simply won’t use them, so new alternatives are needed, said Dr. Long Xu, a professor of biomedical informatics at Case Western Reserve University and lead co-author of the study.
According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, only about a quarter of people with opioid use disorder received the recommended medication in 2022, and many stopped treatment within six months. According to the National Center for Drug Abuse Statistics, opioids are involved in about 72% of overdose deaths in the United States.
The findings add to evidence that GLP-1, a highly popular drug used to treat diabetes and obesity, may have a range of health benefits beyond regulating blood sugar levels and promoting weight loss. Rival Novo Nordisk Eli Lilly And independent researchers have raced to study the drugs’ potential for patients with chronic illnesses ranging from kidney disease and sleep apnea to addictive behaviors like nicotine and alcohol use.
In the study published Wednesday, researchers from Case Western Reserve University and the National Institutes of Health analyzed the electronic records of nearly 33,000 patients who were prescribed semaglutide or other diabetes medications between December 2017 and June 2023. The study was not funded by Novo Nordisk.
About 3,000 were prescribed semaglutide injections, while the rest received a range of treatments from insulin to older GLP-1s for diabetes, including dulaglutide, the active ingredient in Eli Lilly’s drug Trulicity, and liraglutide, the active ingredient in Novo Nordisk’s Victoza.
The researchers monitored how many opioid overdoses occurred in patients in the year after they stopped treatment with semaglutide and other drugs. For example, the study found that one group of patients receiving semaglutide had 42 opioid overdoses, compared with 97 in another group receiving insulin.
This reflected a 58% reduction in the risk of opioid overdose in patients taking semaglutide, Xu said.
But Xu noted that the study had limitations because it relied on data from electronic health records.
According to the study authors, further studies are needed to see how effective Ozempic and other GLP-1s are for people with opioid use disorder, particularly clinical trials in which patients are randomly assigned to semaglutide or other treatments. These randomized studies can also determine whether these treatments benefit all people with opioid use disorder, or just certain people with the disorder.
“It is unclear how effective GLP-1 drugs are in treating opioid use disorder and whether they might help prevent overdose,” Dr. Nora Volkow, director of the National Institute on Drug Abuse at the National Institutes of Health and senior co-author of the study, said in a statement to CNBC. “The preliminary findings from this study suggest that GLP-1 drugs may be useful in preventing opioid overdose.”
Xu added that researchers plan to study semaglutide in patients with opioid use disorder and obesity.