Is it even biologically plausible that Ozempic could lead to suicide? I think it is, actually. First off, we know that the GLP-1 receptor agonists act on receptors in the brain; any drug that can get across the blood-brain barrier, in theory, can have adverse (or positive) psychiatric effects. Also, as I discussed recently, these drugs can have pretty dramatic effects beyond their ability to curb appetite for food: decreasing compulsive gambling and shopping, reducing alcohol intake, and helping to quit smoking. These are all good things, of course, but you wonder whether they could be having some effect on psychological reward systems, and maybe disrupting that, in some people, could lead to despair.
To figure it out, the researchers identified everyone in Sweden and Denmark who started taking semaglutide or liraglutide for diabetes from 2013 to 2021.
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From a psychiatric standpoint, prior to starting the drugs, those who were prescribed Ozempic were more likely to be using or to have previously used antidepressants and to have had an outpatient visit for a psychiatric diagnosis.
Related on the SLP
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I should point out that this is not the only study of this type. This one, in Nature Medicine, looked at more than a million patients and found that the use of Ozempic and similar drugs might substantially decrease the rate of death from suicide.
