GLP-1s Are Showing Promise Beyond Weight Loss. Could They Be 'Wonder Drugs' for Ailments Like Addiction, Dementia and Cancer?

GLP-1s Are Showing Promise Beyond Weight Loss. Could They Be ‘Wonder Drugs’ for Ailments Like Addiction, Dementia and Cancer?

The medications seem to act on the brain’s reward circuitry and help regulate inflammation, which is why they might have so many positive effects. But research on many potential benefits is still preliminary, so clinical trials will truly put GLP-1s to the test

McKenzie Prillaman | Assistant Digital Editor, Science & Innovation

November 13, 2026 10:22 a.m.

You’ve probably been bombarded with ads for GLP-1 medications under brand names like Ozempic, Wegovy and Mounjaro. Many offer a tantalizing promise of weight loss that has been plastered across New York City subway stations and broadcast during the Super Bowl.

But the drugs can do more than help people shed pounds. After all, the Food and Drug Administration approved the first GLP-1, called exenatide, for Type 2 diabetes in 2005.

These medications mimic a hormone called glucagon-like peptide-1, which is naturally generated by the gut after we eat. It tells the body to produce insulin—which is how the medications help people with diabetes manage their blood sugar—as well as slows stomach emptying and increases feelings of satiation, reducing food intake.

Beyond Type 2 diabetes and weight loss, GLP-1s have now been greenlit for a wide range of other conditions, including sleep apnea, heart problems and kidney disease. And recent evidence suggests the medications’ potential could be even broader.

Quick fact: Could GLP-1s stop the biological clock?

In a study published in September, researchers reported that semaglutide could slow aging and extend life span in older female mice.

Clinical epidemiologist Ziyad Al-Aly has been prescribing GLP-1s to patients with kidney issues for years. One of them, a veteran in his 60s who had spent ages trying to quit smoking, told Al-Aly that after taking a GLP-1, he suddenly stopped craving cigarettes.

Similar stories followed, from other patients and acquaintances who no longer felt the urge to indulge their vices, such as alcohol or gambling, once they took a GLP-1. All these anecdotes mounted to a revelation in 2023.

“I was like, ‘OK, is this really happening?’” says Al-Aly, of the V.A. St. Louis Health Care System and the Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis. “Something is happening more than my previous thought, that they only work on diabetes and obesity.”

Clinical trials—the gold standard of medical research—will be required to truly put GLP-1s to the test, especially since most studies of the drugs’ potentially far-ranging benefits are in an early stage. But little by little, Al-Aly and other researchers are investigating the exciting possibility that GLP-1s may be “wonder drugs,” capable of treating or preventing all sorts of ailments, including addiction, dementia and even cancer.

Addiction

Beyond the tales of people whose cravings for illicit substances quieted when they took these drugs, past research in animals and preliminary work in humans had also reported evidence of this phenomenon. But Al-Aly wanted to hunt for more data himself.

Using the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs’ extensive health records, he and his colleagues examined up to three years of medical information from more than 600,000 veterans. All had Type 2 diabetes; some were taking GLP-1s for it, and others were taking a different diabetes drug.

Their findings, published this past March in the British Medical Journal, suggest that GLP-1s can help prevent alcohol, nicotine, opioid and other substance use disorders from forming. They also might help people who already have those addictions avoid overdoses, hospital stays and death.

More specifically, when taking GLP-1s, veterans with no prior history of a substance use disorder had a 14 percent lower risk of developing any of the analyzed addictions compared with the non-GLP-1 users. Similar statistics followed for specific substances: an 18 percent lower risk of developing alcohol use disorder, a 25 percent lower risk of opioid use disorder and a 20 percent lower risk of cocaine or nicotine use disorder.

GLP-1 users with pre-existing substance use disorders also appeared to benefit, with a 31 percent lower risk of an emergency department visit, 26 percent lower risk of a hospital admission, 39 percent lower risk of an overdose and a 50 percent lower risk of death related to substance use, compared with participants taking the other diabetes drug.

“Clearly, these GLP-1 medications are working to suppress addiction,” Al-Aly says. “And what makes it remarkable is that this was not working against smoking or alcohol or cannabis or opioids. It was working across all of them.”

That’s exciting, he adds, because “there’s not a single drug in our toolbox that actually works across all substances.” Nicotine patches can address tobacco, and naltrexone takes aim at opioid and alcohol use disorders. But this work suggests GLP-1s might target the brain circuitry underlying all addictions.

GLP-1 receptors are found in brain regions involved in the reward system, which drives motivation and pleasure. Some people taking the drugs for weight loss have also reported a reduction in food cravings.

But exactly how GLP-1s work remains an open question, says Lorenzo Leggio, a physician-scientist and clinical director of the National Institute on Drug Abuse. “We don’t even fully understand how they work for obesity, and we don’t know if the mechanism how they work for obesity is the same as the mechanism for addiction.”

What’s more, studies looking at health records alone can’t establish whether GLP-1s directly cause people to have fewer substance use disorders—they can only find a “potential causation,” adds Leggio, also of the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism. And the findings of Al-Aly’s study might not be generalizable, since all its participants had Type 2 diabetes.

That’s where randomized clinical trials come in, where researchers arbitrarily split participants into experimental groups and tightly control parameters in prospective work. The results have been promising for alcohol use disorder, with a few published trials finding that GLP-1s have benefits. They all excluded people with diabetes, showing the effect isn’t dependent on that condition, but whether obesity plays a role is still up in the air.

Other clinical trials are in planning or underway. In fact, Leggio’s team just finished recruiting participants for another study on alcohol use disorder. But much less is known about whether GLP-1s can address other addictions, he says. Some human research hints that the drugs can at least help prevent weight gain and blood pressure changes when people quit smoking.

“The field is still in its infancy,” Leggio says.

Dementia

One area where the field is a bit further along is testing whether GLP-1s can treat dementia. But here, scientists have found, the benefits are not so clear-cut.

Health record data showing reduced incidence of dementia among GLP-1 users led to two major clinical trials, which began in 2021 and investigated whether the drugs could slow cognitive decline in people with early Alzheimer’s disease, the most common form of dementia.

The studies, called Evoke and Evoke+ and funded by GLP-1 maker Novo Nordisk, collectively enrolled more than 3,800 participants in 40 countries. All had tested positive for a hallmark of Alzheimer’s: sticky plaques of the protein beta-amyloid in their brains. Some took the GLP-1 semaglutide—the active ingredient in Ozempic and Wegovy—while others took a placebo.

Scientists have suspected the medication could help treat this form of dementia because past animal research has found that it can quell inflammation. Neuroinflammation, or inflammation in the brain, is becoming increasingly recognized as a driver of Alzheimer’s disease progression.

That’s because brain cells known as microglia try to remove the problematic beta-amyloid protein, but they’re unsuccessful, says Jeffrey Cummings, a neurologist at the Kirk Kerkorian School of Medicine at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas. During that process, the activated microglia are also releasing a toxic storm of immune system messengers called cytokines, which contribute to brain inflammation.

“Anti-inflammatory drugs are among the largest class of drugs currently in clinical trials for Alzheimer’s disease,” notes Cummings. The hypothesis that drove the Evoke trials, for which he co-chaired the steering committee, was that reducing inflammation would curb progression of the disease’s cognitive symptoms.

How Alzheimer's Changes the Brain

After taking their assigned pills for two years, the trial participants completed a dementia severity assessment. They also provided blood and cerebrospinal fluid at various stages so researchers could examine biological signs of inflammation and Alzheimer’s. Compared with the control, the GLP-1 was associated with lower inflammation and a small reduction in some of those signs of Alzheimer’s disease.

However, dementia progressed at the same rate among GLP-1 users and those in the placebo group, researchers announced in November 2025, meaning the drug didn’t slow down the disease’s advance.

While the Evoke trials’ negative results were a blow for the field, that doesn’t mean the pursuit is completely over. Some people wonder whether instead of altering Alzheimer’s disease progression, GLP-1s could prevent the neurodegenerative conditions from arising in the first place. The Alzheimer’s Association announced in July the launch of a study to investigate whether GLP-1s can help reduce the risk of cognitive decline in older adults.

Cummings notes that researchers could also explore whether GLP-1s have a stronger effect on dementia in people with Type 2 diabetes—a population where observational data has shown an impact. Fewer than 14 percent of Evoke trial participants had the metabolic condition. Additionally, GLP-1s might actually be better for mitigating vascular dementia, which Type 2 diabetes also elevates the risk of, Cummings says.

Perhaps a more personalized approach would find clearer results, says Alireza Atri, an Alzheimer’s disease expert at Mass General Brigham and Harvard Medical School. He was also on the Evoke trials’ steering committee and says that looking at different subpopulations—such as those with diabetes or other metabolism-related conditions—might reveal who would find semaglutide most helpful. That could inform more targeted clinical trials in the future.

What’s more, although the Evoke trials’ main analyses were performed after two years, some participants were tracked for another year. “If you actually squint and take it with a huge grain of salt, you’ll see that in almost every major outcome, there’s starting to be separation between two and three years,” says Atri. “So, it’s possible that … if the effect is mostly on certain subgroups, it may take longer to show because it’s watered down.”

Cancer

Laboratory data also hints that GLP-1s could have an anti-cancer effect. Cancer involves some of your body’s cells growing out of control, and the drugs seem to inhibit a key molecular signaling pathway that helps the diseased cells divide and spread. Their inflammation-regulating effects could also help thwart cancer, since the disease’s development and progression are associated with inflammation.

Colon cancer runs in the family for hematologist-oncologist Colton Jones. Four of his aunts have died from the disease, and they all had Type 2 diabetes and were overweight or had obesity at some point. Some were taking GLP-1s.

“What I wanted to do was figure out: Could these GLP medications have any other added benefit for my family members personally?” says Jones, of the Mays Cancer Center at University of Texas Health San Antonio.

So, he and his colleagues looked at health records of more than 280,000 people, half of whom took a GLP-1. The others, whose demographics mirrored those in the GLP-1 group, regularly took aspirin, which can reduce the risk of colorectal cancer. Analyses revealed that the GLP-1 users were 36 percent less likely to get colorectal cancer than aspirin users.

“I was surprised to the point where I was like, ‘This is just too good to be true.’ And so, I tested it multiple times,” looking at different participant subgroups, Jones says. “When I saw that the signal remained consistent no matter how much I tried to tweak the data, I knew at that moment that we potentially found something.”

Jones presented the findings this past January at the 2026 American Society of Clinical Oncology (ASCO) Gastrointestinal Cancers Symposium. He and his collaborators have found similar outcomes with breast cancer, pancreatic cancer, leukemia and other cancers, among high-risk individuals.

Ariana Neely, an internal medicine physician at Jefferson Einstein Philadelphia Hospital who also worked on those studies, wanted to fill a knowledge gap related to lung cancer. It’s “one of the top causes of cancer-related mortality in the United States,” she says, but no known drug can help prevent it.

Neely and colleagues examined health records of more than 68,000 people at a high risk for lung cancer and found that those taking GLP-1s were 31 percent less likely to develop the disease than participants who were not on the medications. She presented the analysis in June at the 2026 ASCO Annual Meeting.

These and other observational studies have led to the planning of a massive prospective clinical trial to test whether GLP-1s can prevent breast cancer, the second most common form of cancer among women in the U.S.

For the past two years, the ECOG-ACRIN Cancer Research Group has been designing a prospective study that would enroll around 10,000 participants between the ages of 45 and 79, says Elizabeth McDonald, an interventional breast imager who is helping to design the trial. That age range was chosen because postmenopausal women are at an increased risk of developing breast cancer, especially if they’re overweight. In fact, obesity is a risk factor for multiple cancers and is associated with chronic inflammation.

Some trial participants would take a GLP-1, and all would be followed for three years to see who develops breast cancer. It would be a landmark clinical trial.

“This would be the first and the definitive study, and would likely be the only study,” says McDonald, of the University of Pennsylvania Perelman School of Medicine and Penn’s Abramson Cancer Center. Robust clinical trial evidence that GLP-1s prevent breast cancer, combined with strong observational data across other cancer types, could justify its use in those forms of disease. That’s helpful because trials are extremely expensive, she notes.

That said, McDonald and colleagues are still seeking financial backing for the trial. They’re sending applications to potential funders, such as research foundations, but McDonald says they’ll probably need a substantial contribution from the federal government, which typically pays for big U.S. trials. She estimates that after procuring enough money, researchers could start the study in three months.

A cure-all?

While early data in multiple areas of medicine looks promising, that doesn’t mean GLP-1s will prove to be a panacea. The Evoke trials already failed to pan out for Alzheimer’s disease progression, and even before those results came out, researchers reported that the GLP-1 exenatide did not slow Parkinson’s disease—another neurodegenerative condition linked with dementia—in a trial in the United Kingdom.

What’s more, several drugs have shown exciting potential before—then ended up falling flat in clinical trials.

The Type 2 diabetes medication metformin, for example, initially seemed to have anti-cancer effects in laboratory studies, and observational data looked promising, too. So, around 15 years ago, scientists started working on clinical trials in the hopes that metformin might help prevent or treat cancer. “But when the prospective studies were done, it turned out that this was not true,” Jones says.

Statins, commonly used to treat high cholesterol, also went through a possible wonder-drug phase. Like GLP-1s, they also have anti-inflammatory properties. Statins have been investigated for conditions including rheumatoid arthritis, multiple sclerosis and ulcerative colitis, but are currently FDA-approved primarily for problems related to the heart, blood vessels and metabolism.

“Medicine is replete with hype. When a new medicine comes along, people get excited,” Al-Aly says. Doctors want to see if the new tool can help their patients in multiple ways. But when put through rigorous testing, “much of that [early] evidence does not really pan out,” he adds.

For now, observational evidence could help physicians and patients choose medications based on their potential secondary benefits. If a person with Type 2 diabetes wants to kick their nicotine addiction, for instance, this preliminary work suggests they should consider taking a GLP-1 instead of another diabetes drug.

Although more research is needed, Atri thinks GLP-1s could be the real deal, since they seem to help regulate inflammation caused by the immune system—and immune responses that are too strong or too weak are seen in many illnesses. “Hence, you’re seeing this incredible effect across multiple” health conditions, he says.

“They are probably wonder drugs in many ways.”

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