Ozempic and Cravings: How GLP-1 Drugs Work for Addiction
episode
RECOVERable: Mental Health and Addiction Experts Answer Your Questions
45 min
2 speakers
6 chapters
transcribed 1 month ago
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What is the overall focus of this episode on GLP‑1 drugs and addiction?
This podcast is brought to you by Recovery.com, the best place to find mental health and addiction treatment for anyone, anywhere. Find the right treatment for you or someone you love today at Recovery.com. This year, 10 to 12% of Americans will be on a GLP-1. Dr. Stephen Klein, who specializes in addiction medicine, joins us to discuss innovative treatments, including the role of GLP-1s in substance use disorder recovery.
Addiction is a problem with the brain, and now we have a really good medication to potentially change the brain, and that's going to change the way that we view addiction.
Welcome to Recoverable. I'm your host, Terry McGuire. The history of medicine is full of happy accidents, where a drug designed for one specific use ends up being used for something else and revolutionizing another field. For instance, the hair growth drug Rogaine was originally designed to treat high blood pressure, and Viagra was used to treat high blood pressure and chest pain. This phenomenon is known as drug repurposing, and it's exactly what we're seeing now with GLP-1s. Developed to manage type 2 diabetes, they are now widely used for chronic weight management, and today we're going to discuss the fact that they're also being used to treat addictions. And joining us now is Dr. Stephen Klein, who not only is an expert in this topic, but has lived experience with it as well.
Dr. Klein, welcome back. Thank you so much for having me. Thank you. So GLP-1s, that's a shift. How did this come about and tell us how it has worked for you in your life?
Sure. So I'll start with my story first. So like we covered a little bit in the last episode, I'm a person in long-term recovery. I've been sober for the past nine years. Part of my recovery journey was the pleasure of doing medical residency sober. My medical residency was also during the global pandemic. So as a resident in pediatrics in the inner city of Philadelphia, at that time, it was very stressful to be in the hospital. Many people saw this on the news, but really to live it, to go every day to the emergency room, not know what was going to happen, not know the right masks, if the virus was surviving on the floors, on the patients, what would happen. And we really didn't know how it was going to affect children.
And that was probably how it affected me the most. But what was also really hard was that all of our coping mechanisms were taken away. So we didn't have the gym. We didn't have dinner with friends. We didn't have, you know, things that we were doing to kind of maintain that balance. And for me, as a person at that point being four years sober, I really struggled with eating. I just started to go to work. I would come home, take off my scrubs, do the like laundry or whatever they were telling us to do at that time. And then I would order DoorDash like a lot of people were doing in the lockdown. But for me, that was really challenging because I started to put on a lot of weight. And when the pandemic somewhat subsided, I went back to see my primary care doctor.
I really told her at that point I was struggling with about 35 to 40 pounds of extra weight. And she said, you know, there are these new class of medications. They're really effective. Why don't I prescribe one for you? And we'll see if we can get insurance to cover it. And if so, great. She prescribed me Bonjorno, which is now ZepBound. I started it and just had the most incredible transformative experience. It made me realize that I was likely a food addict before I was a drug addict. I had had a problematic relationship with food, my body image, and my weight my entire life, being a heavy child, losing weight in college, gaining weight again in medical school. And it really drew attention for me to the amount of mental equity I was expending thinking about food, thinking about diet, thinking about what I was or wasn't eating, working, working not out, how I was burning things off.
And somewhat overnight, my relationship with food normalized. Is that the chatter that we hear?
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Chapters
6 chapters
1
What is the overall focus of this episode on GLP‑1 drugs and addiction?
0:00–7:01
2
How did Dr. Klein’s personal story illustrate the impact of GLP‑1s on food cravings?
7:01–15:13
3
Why did GLP‑1 medications move onto the addiction‑treatment radar?
15:13–22:41
4
How do GLP‑1 drugs target the brain’s mesolimbic dopamine system to reduce cravings?
22:41–31:29
5
What are the common gastrointestinal side effects of GLP‑1 therapy and how can they be managed?
31:29–39:52
6
Does brain rewiring continue after a patient stops taking GLP‑1 medication?
39:52–45:04
Speakers
2 identifiedMore from RECOVERable: Mental Health and Addiction Experts Answer Your Questions
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