Lose weight with mindful eating 0:48

(CNN) — Cheri Ferguson has swapped her vaporizer for an Ozempic.

One day seven weeks ago, "I thought, 'You're doing something with your weight; leave the vape at home,'" Ferguson says.

Since then, he hasn't picked it up again.

Ferguson is one of many people who take Ozempic and similar weight-loss drugs and say they have also noticed an effect on their interest in addictive behaviors, such as tobacco and alcohol.

A smoker for most of her life, Ferguson started taking Ozempic 11 weeks ago to try to lose the 15 kilos she had gained during the covid-19 pandemic, which had made her pre-diabetic.

Last summer he swapped cigarettes for vaping in hopes of quitting, but found vaping to be even more addictive. That changed when he started using Ozempic.

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"It's like someone just came in and turned on the light, and you can see the room for what it is," Ferguson said. "And all those vaporizers and cigarettes you've had over the years don't seem appealing to you anymore. It's very, very strange. Very strange."

Ferguson says he also drinks less alcohol with Ozempic. Whereas before he had several drinks in a pub while watching a football match in Buckinghamshire (United Kingdom), now he is content with just one.

Some doctors claim that, when it comes to addictive behaviors, the effect on alcohol consumption is what they hear most from people taking Ozempic or similar medications.

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"Several patients have described it to me and asked me because they're curious if this change could be due to this drug," says Jena Shaw Tronieri, M.D., associate professor of psychiatry and director of clinical services at the Center for Weight and Eating Disorders at the University of Pennsylvania's Perelman School of Medicine.

Tronieri is conducting a clinical trial with semaglutide (the generic name for Ozempic) — approved for diabetes — and Wegovy — approved for weight loss — to better understand their long-term effects on appetite. In many lifestyle modification trials he has led, he had never had participants report this type of feeling about alcohol.

But with semaglutide, "people say, 'You know what, I'm not interested anymore. I don't feel like drinking,'" he says.

And when asked if it might be the drug, he tells them there's no evidence to say for sure, "but there's reason to believe that might be one of the effects."

Dr. Lorenzo Leggio studies this question at the National Institutes of Health. He and a team of researchers have just published a study showing that semaglutide reduces alcohol consumption in rodents.

Drugs such as semaglutide, from a class known as GLP-1 analogues, can influence interest in things like alcohol because they have an effect not only on the gut, but also on the brain, Leggio said.

"We think that at least one of the mechanisms of how these drugs reduce alcohol consumption is by reducing the rewarding effects of alcohol, such as those related to a neurotransmitter in our brain, which is dopamine," he said. "So these medications are likely to make alcohol less rewarding."

But its impact could go beyond alcohol and tobacco. Leggio said his team is also studying whether semaglutide has an effect on fentanyl use disorder. And The Atlantic recently reported that people taking Ozempic have said it has helped them quit addictive behaviors like nail biting and online shopping.

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"There is a lot of overlap in the neurobiological mechanisms that regulate addictive behaviors in general," Leggio said. "So it's possible that drugs like semaglutide, by acting on this specific mechanism in the brain, could help people with various addictive behaviors."

Further research is needed, particularly in human clinical trials, to show that semaglutide and similar drugs have this effect, he said.

But there aren't many going on. One of them, which studies the effect of semaglutide on alcohol and tobacco consumption, is being conducted at the University of North Carolina.

Christian Hendershot, an associate professor in the Department of Psychiatry and the Bowles Center for Alcohol Studies at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, who is leading the trials, wrote in an email to CNN: "We do not yet have the clinical data needed to draw conclusions." It seems very clear, based on people who have contacted us regarding our trials (in particular, several treatment providers), that many patients are experiencing some significant side benefits from following these treatments."

Leggio was disappointed, but not surprised, to hear that pharmaceutical companies were not studying GLP-1 drugs for addictions, adding that the lack of pharmaceutical industry-sponsored trials for addiction treatments is a notable problem in this field.

But trials are what will be needed to prove that the experiences reported by Ferguson and many others are true effects of the drugs.

Ferguson says he has lost 18 kilos since he started taking Ozempic. But the most important thing for her is how the medication has helped her quiet her constant thoughts about food, vaping or alcohol.

"If I had known I would feel this way, I probably would have done it a year ago, when I started fighting" weight gain, Ferguson said. "The weight it takes off your mind is far greater than any pound it can take away from your body."

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