Drugs like Ozempic now make up 5% of prescriptions in the US

Anecdotes are everywhere: a person on a weight loss drug realizes that hunger is not the only craving that seems to stop.

Those are the kinds of clues Eli Lilly CEO David Ricks says his company will pursue next year, testing whether its drug GLP-1, tirzepatide (called Mounjaro for diabetes and Zepbound for weight loss), could help addiction to alcohol, nicotine and “other things we don’t think about [as being] associated with weight.”

IN comments he made in DecemberRicks said the drugs could be “anti-hedonic” — meaning they oppose our hedonic pursuit of pleasure, whether it’s food, alcoholor drugs. Study this year, mining of digital health records found that opioid addicts who took the medication were about half as likely to have overdosed.

Apnea during sleep

This idea goes back a long way, including a 2015 case study of a 260-pound man with diabetes and sleep apnea. When he started taking the drug liraglutide, doctors noticed an improvement in his sleep.

With sleep apnea, a person catches air at night – this is uncomfortable and eventually causes health problems. This year, Eli Lilly published a study in the journal New England Journal of Medicine to your medicine tirzepatide finding that it caused a 50% reduction in breathing interruptions in overweight patients with sleep apnea.

Longevity

This year, the US Food and Drug Administration approved by Wegovy as a cardiovascular drugafter researchers showed the drugs could reduce heart attacks and strokes in overweight people.

But that was not all. The study, which involved 17,000 people, found that the drug reduced the overall chance of someone dying from any cause (known as “all-cause mortality”) by 19%.

This is now attracting the attention of senior researchers. This year named Wegovy and similar drugs among their top four candidates for a generic life-extending drug.