(ORDO NEWS) — When Erin Bradley McAleer attended sports events and parties at work, he could safely drink 8-10 cans of beer. For him, this was not just a “norm”, but something like “his own religion.”
It is difficult to call this side effect “bad”. After all, alcohol addiction is a bad thing.
“If I’ve had one, then I’ll have another drink before eight, ” McAleer said in an interview. A 43-year-old criminal lawyer in the state of Washington, USA, with a height of 180 cm, weighed 145 kg!
However, over the past year, the man has almost stopped going to parties and drinking. No, he didn’t go through some sort of drinking disaster, and he didn’t go to the Alcoholics Anonymous club. Alcohol… he just didn’t like it!
What happened?
McAleer says he no longer has a physical craving for alcohol, which he believes is a side effect of the weight loss drug semaglutide ( a drug used to treat type 2 diabetes and obesity. It should not be taken without a doctor’s prescription ).
Since the man started taking the medicine in the fall of 2021, “he just got uninterested.” But McAleer elaborates: “I’ve never had that before.”
McAleer is not the only patient to report a significant reduction in alcohol consumption after starting semaglutide.
One Reddit user wrote that he used to drink two or three drinks a night, but taking semaglutide was “like a light switch.” “No high, no fun,” he wrote. “So now I probably don’t drink.”
“Alcohol Cure”
Dr. Paul Kolodzik, a metabolism expert who specializes in the field of addiction, notes that with proper research, semaglutide could become an addiction drug. How does it work?
Semaglutide increases the production of insulin, a hormone that helps regulate blood sugar levels.
Although the drug was originally developed to treat diabetes, it was subsequently approved as a weight loss treatment in June 2021. Studies have shown that it can lead to a 15-20% weight loss in 68 weeks.
Kolodzik believes that there are several possible reasons why such drugs “increase the feeling of fullness in the stomach and in the head.”
This drug affects the brain’s reward system by blunting the release of dopamine that a person might otherwise get from fatty fries, ice cream, or martinis. Therefore, things that used to give pleasure become not so pleasant.
There are currently insufficient human studies for semaglutide to be approved as a treatment for alcohol use disorders.
The only study in this regard did not find a significant reduction in the number of days of drinking in addicted patients who received the drug compared to those who received a placebo.
But it showed that the drug suppressed the brain’s response to alcohol signals, which could lead to less alcohol cravings.
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