Health Claims

Some parts of the brain that control pleasure and addiction have special spots (called GLP-1 receptors) that certain drugs can target, which might help reduce addictive behaviors by affecting brain chemicals like dopamine.

A type of diabetes drug might help reduce cravings and relapse in addiction by affecting brain signals tied to pleasure and reward — at least in animals.

For people with heart disease but not diabetes, taking semaglutide seems to lower the chance of having a non-fatal heart attack over about three years — 2.7% of users had one versus 3.7% who didn’t take it.

For people with heart disease, taking semaglutide means about 1 in 12 will stop treatment because of stomach problems like nausea or diarrhea — much more common than with a dummy pill.

If you're 45 or older, have heart disease, and are overweight but don’t have diabetes, taking semaglutide for about 3 years might lower your chance of having a serious heart problem by a small amount — about 1.5%. That means 67 people need to take it for one person to avoid a heart event, which gives a clearer picture than the often-shared 20% drop in risk.

The kidney benefits from taking a weekly semaglutide shot for weight and heart health probably aren't just because it lowers blood sugar or blood pressure — there might be other ways it's helping the kidneys.

Taking a weekly semaglutide shot might help protect your kidneys by reducing a marker of kidney damage, especially if you already have early signs of kidney issues.

For adults who are overweight, have heart disease, and early kidney problems but not diabetes, taking a weekly semaglutide shot might help their kidneys work better over two years compared to a placebo.

For adults who are overweight, have heart disease, but don’t have diabetes, taking a weekly semaglutide shot might help slow down how fast their kidneys lose function each year.

Taking a weekly semaglutide shot might help protect the kidneys in people with extra weight and heart disease—even if they don’t have diabetes.

For people who are overweight or obese, have heart disease but not diabetes, the biggest things that decide whether semaglutide is worth the cost are how well it prevents death and how much the drug itself costs.

If the price of semaglutide is cut in half, it might become a good value for treating people with heart disease who are overweight or obese—even if they don’t have diabetes—because it could add healthy years of life for less than $50,000 per year of quality life gained.

For people who are overweight or obese, have heart disease but not diabetes, taking a weekly semaglutide shot might help them live healthier, longer lives — and it would cost about $73,000 for each extra year of good-quality life, according to computer modeling.

In monkeys, a substance called E2HSA helped their bodies release more insulin when blood sugar went up and kept sugar levels more stable during tough metabolic tests.

This drug called E2HSA seems to make monkeys eat less the more they get, which might help control their appetite and improve their metabolism.

In healthy monkeys, a substance called E2HSA seems to help control blood sugar after meals and during fasting, which means it might help regulate blood sugar overall.

A modified compound called E2HSA still works in lab tests like a diabetes drug, even if it's not as strong as the original version.

A new diabetes drug version lasts much longer in the body—about two and a half days—compared to the original, so you might only need to take it once a week instead of every day.

Heart patients who got a new heart and take GLP-1 drugs (like those for diabetes) don’t seem to have any change in how well their heart muscle cells make energy — the drug doesn’t appear to affect this part of heart cell function.

Heart transplant patients on GLP-1 drugs might have healthier heart cell energy factories because their cells are leaking less energy.

People who've had heart transplants and take GLP-1 drugs might have healthier heart cell energy factories, because their cells use energy more efficiently and waste less fuel.

For people with type 2 diabetes and healthy kidneys, taking a weekly exenatide shot might slightly lower the risk of heart problems or dying, but the evidence isn't strong and hasn't been fully checked for other factors.

A weekly diabetes shot called exenatide doesn’t seem to lower the risk of serious kidney problems in adults with type 2 diabetes when looking at the raw data. But when researchers adjusted the numbers, it showed a small benefit when including a wider range of kidney issues, like high protein in the urine.

Taking a weekly diabetes shot called exenatide doesn’t seem to lower the risk of a specific type of kidney problem in adults with type 2 diabetes — the numbers don’t show a clear benefit.