It’s not just weight loss and diabetes: GLP-1 drugs like Ozempic and Wegovy may also help patients suffering from anxiety and depression, a new study has found.
Semaglutide, the active ingredient in Ozempic, Wegovy and Rybelsus, was associated with a lower risk of worsening mental health, the study published in Lancet Psychiatry found.
“We found that semaglutide and, to a lesser extent, liraglutide were associated with significantly lower risk of worsening mental illness… in people using antidiabetic medications, compared with time periods when GLP-1 receptor agonists were not used,” the study said.
The study defined mental illness as a combination of hospitalization due to mental disorder or self-harm, sick leave for psychiatric reasons, or suicide.
“This was a large study of the Swedish database, which is a very large, well-known database which has data on all Swedes from birth until death. They know who has diabetes and who doesn’t have diabetes and the drugs that they take,” said Dr. Hertzel Gerstein, professor at McMaster University and at Hamilton Health Sciences.
Researchers looked at the health records of 95,490 people in Sweden, 81 per cent of whom had anxiety, 55 per cent had depression and 36 per cent had both conditions. The study compared their risk of mental health conditions in periods when they were taking GLP-1 drugs and in periods when they weren’t.
Semaglutide was linked to a 42 per cent lower risk of worsening mental health overall, 38 per cent lower risk of worsening anxiety disorder and 44 per cent lower risk of worsening depression, the study found.
The drug could also prove to be effective for those struggling with addiction and substance use, with the study finding a 47 per cent lower risk of worsening substance use disorder associated with semaglutide.
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Liraglutide, marketed under the brand name Victoza in Canada, was linked to an 18 per cent lower risk of mental illness.
However, the study warns that it has several limitations.
For one, it can only be generalized to health-care systems that are similar to Sweden.
“The cost of GLP-1 receptor agonists can be an obstacle to access in private health-care systems for people who would most benefit from these medications until cheaper generic GLP-1 receptor agonist medications become available,” it said.
It adds that the “main limitation of this work is that causality cannot be attributed in an observational study.”
The study is only “observational,” Dr. Gerstein said, but it opens the door to more conclusive studies involving randomized trials.
“Just because two things related to one another doesn’t mean that one causes the other. There’s a phrase … correlation is not the same as causation,” he said.
“You need to do what’s called a randomized trial, where you give half of people a drug like semaglutide and half of the people not, then you follow them to see if there are lower rates of depression. And in fact, even this paper suggests that that would be the next step,” Dr. Gerstein added.
There have now been many studies and analyses that suggest that the use of GLP-1 drugs goes beyond just weight loss and diabetes, with potential benefits ranging from helping mental illness and substance abuse to kidney disease, heart disease and even osteoarthritis, he added.
While multiple studies have said there is data suggesting benefits from semaglutide, others have also found risks.
A 2023 study out of the University of British Columbia found that GLP-1 drugs were associated with an increased risk of stomach paralysis, pancreatitis and bowel obstruction.
In 2024, a Harvard study found that the drugs were also linked to an increased risk of sudden and irreversible vision loss and blindness.
Last year, the European Medicines Agency’s safety committee concluded that the use of Wegovy may cause rare occurrences of a potentially dangerous eye condition.
Called non-arteritic anterior ischemic optic neuropathy (NAION), the condition may affect up to 1 in 10,000 people taking semaglutide, the regulator said.
Some of the more common side effects associated with semaglutide include belching, bloating, constipation, diarrhea, stomach pain, indigestion and nausea, among others.
In rare cases, it has also been associated with confusion, dizziness, tiredness and fainting among others.
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