People Taking Semaglutide Appear to Be WAY Less Likely to Die of an Opioid Overdose

In surprising results, medical researchers have found that people who take Novo Nordisk’s semaglutide-based injectables Ozempic and Wegovy seem to be strikingly less likely to die from overdosing on opioids.

In a press release about its new research, Case Western Reserve University School of Medicine explained how this new analysis, published in the Journal of the American Medical Association Network Open, took shape.

Led by biomedical informatics expert Rong Xu, the school’s researchers looked at nearly six years of data, taken between 2017 and 2023, for over 33,000 patients who both had Type 2 Diabetes and who had been diagnosed with opioid use disorder (OUD).

Among those subjects, roughly 3,000 had been prescribed semaglutide, which is also the active ingredient in Novo’s weight loss pill Rybelsus. The rest of the patients whose records were analyzed were on other diabetes drugs like metformin, insulin, and others that belong to the GLP-1 class of weight loss medications.

The researchers found that overall, the patients who used semaglutide had a 58 percent lower chance of dying from an opioid overdose than their peers who were on other medications, which included older generations of similar drugs like Eli Lilly’s dulaglutide-based drug Trulicity and even Novo’s other GLP-1, the liraglutide-based Victoza.

Exactly why the drug results in fewer opioid deaths isn’t clear, the researchers admitted, though it’s likely it has to do with the poorly-understood mechanism by which the drug changes users’ relationships to cravings for everything ranging from cigarettes to alcohol, not just food. Major details are also still hazy, like whether patients are managing to kick opioids entirely or just taking less at a time.

These findings — which unlike many similar studies weren’t funded by the drugmaker itself — add to the laundry list of health benefits associated with GLP-1s, which along with helping people lose weight have been linked to lowered alcohol and tobacco intake, better heart health, and other surprising positive side effects culminating in a conspicuously reduced overall chance of death.

Despite there being medications on the market to treat OUD, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention estimates that only 25 percent of people struggling with opioid addiction use them — and many of those who do will discontinue their use within six months.

“Not everyone receives or responds to [OUD drugs],” Xu said in the press release. “As a result, alternative medications to help people treat opioid use disorder and prevent overdosing are crucial.”

Xu, who also leads Case Western’s Center for AI in Drug Discovery, noted that the study’s limitations keep it from drawing firm causal conclusions about the links between semaglutide and lowered risk of opioid overdose.

Nevertheless, she boasted that the findings “suggest that it is important to continue studying semaglutide as a possible new treatment” for the epidemic that took more than 100,000 lives last year in the United States.

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