Is Ozempic Really an Anti-Inflammatory Drug?
Ozempic, Zepbound and other glucagonlike peptide 1 (GLP-1) drugs have shown sweeping health benefits—they can control blood sugar, manage body weight and improve heart health. And last year GLP-1 drugs received U.S. Food and Drug Administration approval to treat kidney and liver disease.
Some scientists think these body-wide benefits are likely tied to the drugs’ weight-loss effects, but growing research suggests another factor may be at play: taming inflammation. To tease this out, researchers are trying to chart which anti-inflammatory pathways the drugs might activate. This could help them better understand what’s been seen clinically and open the door to GLP-1 treatments for a variety of inflammatory diseases, says Daniel Drucker, an endocrinologist at the University of Toronto, who is studying GLP-1 drugs’ widespread effects.
“Yes, weight loss is important, but it’s by no means the whole story,” he says. “We have patients [taking GLP-1s] who are telling us, ‘Wow, my arthritis is better,’ ‘My Crohn’s or colitis is better,’ and that motivates us to say, ‘Well, how is that happening?’”
Excerpted from Scientific American
