United States: Semaglutide, active ingredient of Ozempic and Wegovy, seemed to reduce of Alzheimer’s risk among people with Type 2 diabetes, a study led by Scientists of the University of California, San Diego in the United States, showed on Thursday, according to the Alzheimer’s & Dementia journal.
The study provides more information towards the theory that GLP-1 drugs – which are the family of medications that include Mounjaro and Zepbound – are good for the brain, as reported by NBC News.
The company of Ozempic and Wegovy known as Novo Nordisk recruited over 3,000 people with mild cognitive impairment or early-stage Alzheimer’s in two phase 3 semaglutide studies that compare this treatment with a placebo. From these trials, it is expected that the results will be released sometime in the next year.
If those trial results are positive, semaglutide “would be a game changer, adding a whole new treatment option that we didn’t previously have in our tool kit,” said Dr. Stephen Salloway, a professor of neurology at Warren Alpert Medical School of Brown University in Rhode Island.
“If this actually works, it would be huge,” Salloway said.
How did semaglutide perform?
The new study set semaglutide against seven other diabetes medications including metformin, insulin, and other GLP-1 drugs such as liraglutide.
The researchers analyzed records of over 1 million patients with Type 2 diabetes over 60, newly prescribed one of the drugs for three years. They also needed to have one or more of the following comorbidities—obesity, hypertension, or a history of heart diseases; and could not have been on any diabetes medication within the preceding 6 months.
The study did establish some correlation between patients, who have taken semaglutide and the risks of Alzheimer’s disease and it stated that patients taking semaglutide had 18% less chance of developing the disease than patients who had taken any of the seven other diabetes drugs. No significant difference was observed based on gender, age, and weight of the participants.
The biggest difference was seen when comparing patients who took semaglutide to those who took insulin: Semaglutide use resulted in 70 percent reduction of the risk of Alzheimer’s as resulted by the trial.
Semaglutide also reduced cardiovascular risk by statistically significant with old GLP1 drugs such as liraglutide which amazed the senior study author Rong Xu, Director of the Center for Artificial Intelligence in Drug Discovery at Case Western Reserve University School of Medicine in Ohio.
The highest Ozempic dosage is 2 milligrams while Wegovy’s dosage is 2.4 milligrams per mouthful. The patients in the study on semaglutide were given Ozempic to take, according to Xu who went on to explain.
How could GLP-1s help?
Two drugs — Leqembi from Biogen and Kisunla from Lilly — that partially mitigate the disease’s progression by addressing amyloid plaques in the affected brain have been approved by the Food and Drug Administration. However, they are expensive and can cause severe side effects such as brain edema and intracranial hemorrhage.
It can also mean a chance to provide patients with their first preventive treatment if semaglutide was shown in clinical trials to decrease the likelihood of the disease.
In a statement, a Novo Nordisk spokesperson said the company “welcomes independent research investigating the safety, efficacy, and clinical utility of our products.”
Salloway said that it is still unclear to researchers how semaglutide works to prevent Alzheimer’s disease and the extent of protection to the brain.
But research proves that the drug exhibits beneficial impacts against inflammation, diabetes, obesity, and heart disease all of which are factors that lead to dementia and Alzheimer’s, he said.
GLP-1 Drugs Affect Alzheimer’s Disease
“Besides weight loss, of course, everything they’ve been trying for they’ve been working for,” Salloway said. “They lower the rate of heart attack, they control diabetes, they lower the rate of stroke, they control renal disease, so numerous positive effects.”
From an interview, Dr. Donna Wilcock interviewed who is the editor-in-chief of Alzheimer’s & Dementia and a professor of neurology at the Indiana University School of Medicine said that there has been increasing curiosity if GLP-1 drugs might affect Alzheimer’s.
“They enhance the status of the blood vessels, and as we all appreciate, blood vessels are affected in Alzheimer’s disease, and also cerebral small vessel diseases, which often occur with Alzheimer’s and other Neuro-degenerative diseases,” Wilcock said. The authors are ambiguous regarding whether these benefits are apart from the effect on Type 2 diabetes which has potential implications for dementia or whether the additional benefits are due to better management of Type 2 diabetes.
Dr. Alberto Espay, a neurologist at the University of Cincinnati College of Medicine, emphasized that to say that these drugs are effective against Alzheimer’s, there is still much more research to be done.
Alzheimer’s is presumed to be a condition of multiple diseases, Espay said, so essentially there will not be a one-size-fits-all type of cure.
In addition, early research indicated that statins, nonsteroidal anti-inflammatory drugs, and insulin were favorable for Alzheimer’s, but none of those therapies proved to be beneficial in subsequent research, as reported by NBC News.
“Just as with statins, NSAIDs, and insulin, we should be cautious about claiming semaglutide can treat or prevent Alzheimer’s based on this study alone,” Espay said.