Popular Weight Loss Drug Shows Promise for Smoking Cessation

[NNadir]

I started on semaglutide about two months ago. I had gone to a scientific conference on which data on the drug was presented and, as I am clearly prediabetic - diabetes, a genetic disease, killed one of my Grandfathers - I wondered why I wasn't on this drug, so I emailed my doctor's office, and they agreed I should be on the drug.

I'm still bald, fat and ugly, but I'm less fat. I've lost 28 pounds as of this morning.

I don't, thankfully, smoke, but this article came in on my news feed this morning:

Popular Weight Loss Drug Shows Promise for Smoking Cessation

Subtitle:

Semaglutide, used to treat type 2 diabetes and obesity, could hold promise for supporting efforts to stop smoking.

Excerpts:

Semaglutide is a drug that has been steadily growing in popularity, marketed as Wegovy® for weight loss and Ozempic® for type 2 diabetes treatment.

Emerging evidence suggests that semaglutide and other drugs in the same class – known as glucagon-like peptide receptor agonists (GLP1-RAs) – may have benefits for other conditions. For example, reducing the risk of dementia in older diabetes patients or lowering the incidence of alcohol use disorder.

Some semaglutide-treated patients have reported a reduced desire to smoke – something that researchers from the National Institute on Drug Abuse, National Institutes of Health and Case Western Reserve University School of Medicine wanted to investigate further...

....However, while the findings only suggest that semaglutide could be beneficial for smoking cessation, the study is not able to prove causation and should not be used to support off-label use of semaglutide before additional studies are carried out.

“The nature of the study design means that its findings would need to be examined in large randomized controlled trials before we could conclude that semaglutide might have an impact on smoking cessation,” Richardson added.

“The authors acknowledge a key limitation of their work: a reduction in medical encounters related to tobacco may indicate that people are reducing their use of tobacco, but could also mean that they are less willing to seek help to quit smoking.”

Reference: Wang W, Volkow ND, Berger NA, Davis PB, Kaelber DC, Xu R. Association of semaglutide with tobacco use disorder in patients with type 2 diabetes. Ann Intern Med. 2024.

There is no news as of yet as to whether the drug vacuums the rugs, waxes the car, or takes out the garbage, but it does seem like something of a medical miracle.