Drugs like Ozempic and Wegovy could significantly cut dementia risk
Dozens of trials testing GLP-1 drugs like semaglutide, the medicine in Ozempic and Wegovy, against a placebo suggest that they really could protect against dementia
By Sara Novak
7 April 2025
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TEK IMAGE/SCIENCE PHOTO LIBRARY
Diabetes and weight loss treatments such as Ozempic and Wegovy, known as GLP-1 agonists, could significantly reduce the risk of developing any type of dementia, according to a meta-analysis of 26 clinical trials with more than 160,000 participants.
The treatments, which include medications like semaglutide, liraglutide and exenatide, have been linked to a slightly reduced dementia risk before, but this was based on observational studies looking at health records.
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Now, Catriona Reddin at the University of Galway in Ireland and her colleagues have combined the results of randomised trials where a range of GLP-1 drugs were given to people with type 2 diabetes who hadn’t yet been diagnosed with dementia or cognitive impairment, tested against a placebo. They found that taking these drugs seemed to significantly reduce the risk of developing dementia or cognitive impairment during the trials’ minimum six-month follow-up periods.
“The gold standard would be one large, randomised trial to answer this question, but this definitely adds another stream of evidence [to past studies],” says Ziyad Al-Aly at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis, Missouri, who wasn’t involved in this research.
Diabetes may be a risk factor for dementia, so it has been suggested that just controlling blood sugar levels produces this protective effect. For instance, a study by Jingchuan Guo at the University of Florida and her colleagues suggests that a class of diabetes drugs called SGLT2 inhibitors, which lower blood sugar levels by helping the kidneys remove excess glucose, may reduce the risk of Alzheimer’s disease or related kinds of dementia, based on people’s health records.
