per usual, you're hot on the trail. I've been studying peptides for a bit and am VERY interested in semaglutide (I'm an addiction psychiatrist) because I have some patients who have extreme difficulty stopping drinking (multiple trials of treatments) and they are heavy drinkers.. im going to add, the relationship id like to understand is how GLP-1 may impact the 'compulsion' or 'craving' with food or a substance. People describe to me (who take it for weight loss) a satiety and/or feeling full 'im done'. That is similar to my patients who use naltrexone (in a harm reduction method) and feel one drink is enough.
Well, thanks Dr. Lazarevic! It would be rather interesting to consider the role of GLP-1 expression. I'm curious if something may happen in obese individuals in which incretin hormones just get shut off or dysregulated and then insulin gets mismanaged. Since the initial cells are found in the intestines, maybe there's a closer relationship between GLP-1 and the microbiome that has yet to be examined.
I would also like to get a better understanding for these reward mechanisms that seem to be found in animal models. Maybe we'll find that addiction may stem from some reduced expression of some of these critical genes, or maybe some disorder in how they end up being expressed. It may provide insight into addictive behavior having some molecular basis which would be really interesting to uncover!
The Klausen, et al. review above notes naltrexone as a reference molecule for their hypotheses. It does seem as if there's a distinction between "I'm done/ I feel satiated" and "this makes me feel sick".
i look forward to learning more as this area develops, thank you for writing on this topic. Addiction is such a complex problem, we need as many tools as possible to help people.
Given that opioid addiction has been a declared emergency since 2017, Becerra has already laid the groundwork for authorizing such treatments via Emergency Use Authorization.
You're right about that, and I actually overlooked that issue. I have raised concerns that many drugs will soon see EUA approval over the littlest things. I should have recognized that this may be the case with respect to these drugs, so thanks for pointing that out! It would be an interesting perspective to have when looking at what happens with Ozempic and the like.
The scary part is the sub rosa way Becerra did it--slipping a notice into the Federal Register with no fanfare. If people weren't already questioning the EUAs for the mRNA inoculations it probably would not have been noticed, and even as it was it was barely noticed.
Absolutely NOTHING stands between him and doing something similar for opioids, giving Ozempic and any other drug a back door into entirely new markets with virtually zero safety testing.
The last remaining circuit breaker to keep harmful therapeutics off the market has now been bypassed. Be afraid. Be very afraid.
There is another way. For weight control it involves avoiding foods to which the individual has become sensitized, and ensuring that what remains is of high quality. It's hard to see how experiments on rodents fed the usual crap-in-a-bag diets would ever shed light on any of this, any more than do RCTs employing one pharmaceutical as a "placebo" for comparison with another shed light on efficacy.
For addictions, and for weight control beyond what stems from bad food itself, there are other causes to consider, pharmaceutical consumption insufficiency not being one of them. A book that I read years ago comes to mind, _In the Realm of Hungry Ghosts_ by Gabor Maté and Peter A. Levine (2010). It speaks of the "hole in the soul" underlying addiction.
When dealing with "the diseases of [modern] civilization", the answer is not likely to be drugs. It would more likely -- for those not seeking a quick-and-dirty fix -- look like a return to something resembling what people ate and did before these diseases became epidemic, and what they still eat and do in some "less developed" parts of the world.
I think one facet to the obesity/ GLP-1 argument may lie in the microbiome. It's possible that poor diets may damage the microbiome and alter the cardiometabolic response including alterations in GLP-1 expression. The use of these sorts of drugs may be more of a compensatory mechanism for something that has been damaged. It's not necessarily that the answer is drugs, but what the drugs are doing, and why such a drug would be needed.
So I wouldn't argue that the answer to addiction may lie in pharmaceuticals, but pharmaceuticals are at least telling us something about the body's biochemistry may be off-kilter, and that may be worth looking into in order to figure out why.
So some searchers I came across raised the concern of possible pancreatic cancer. I didn't come across any in regards to bowel cancer. From the very quick glance I've seen of a meta-analysis they seem to argue that the rates of cancer don't pass the usual noise burden, but that doesn't mean that these drugs may not have an effect on cancer. The fact that the intestines produce GLP-1, and that the pancreas highly responds to GLP-1 sort of makes sense why these places may be possible organs of interest with respect to cancer formation with these drugs.
I think a more widespread concern could be the fact that these drugs may induce some form of tolerance in the same ways that diabetics experience tolerance to insulin. These drugs are designed to have far longer half-lives, and greater affinity to receptors as compared to their natural brothers, so longer, stronger activation of receptors may come with some unknown consequences.
I was just about to ask re side effects as I haven't had time to look at Oztempic in detail as yet. But I did remember reading something about "awesome new drug, but whoops! Sorry about the side order of cancer." Or something along those lines😉
per usual, you're hot on the trail. I've been studying peptides for a bit and am VERY interested in semaglutide (I'm an addiction psychiatrist) because I have some patients who have extreme difficulty stopping drinking (multiple trials of treatments) and they are heavy drinkers.. im going to add, the relationship id like to understand is how GLP-1 may impact the 'compulsion' or 'craving' with food or a substance. People describe to me (who take it for weight loss) a satiety and/or feeling full 'im done'. That is similar to my patients who use naltrexone (in a harm reduction method) and feel one drink is enough.
Well, thanks Dr. Lazarevic! It would be rather interesting to consider the role of GLP-1 expression. I'm curious if something may happen in obese individuals in which incretin hormones just get shut off or dysregulated and then insulin gets mismanaged. Since the initial cells are found in the intestines, maybe there's a closer relationship between GLP-1 and the microbiome that has yet to be examined.
I would also like to get a better understanding for these reward mechanisms that seem to be found in animal models. Maybe we'll find that addiction may stem from some reduced expression of some of these critical genes, or maybe some disorder in how they end up being expressed. It may provide insight into addictive behavior having some molecular basis which would be really interesting to uncover!
The Klausen, et al. review above notes naltrexone as a reference molecule for their hypotheses. It does seem as if there's a distinction between "I'm done/ I feel satiated" and "this makes me feel sick".
i look forward to learning more as this area develops, thank you for writing on this topic. Addiction is such a complex problem, we need as many tools as possible to help people.
Given that opioid addiction has been a declared emergency since 2017, Becerra has already laid the groundwork for authorizing such treatments via Emergency Use Authorization.
https://newsletter.allfactsmatter.us/p/fda-pulls-pfizer-and-moderna-euas
Which means if Big Pharma thinks it can sell more Ozempic by treating addiction it will get no pushback from the FDA.
You're right about that, and I actually overlooked that issue. I have raised concerns that many drugs will soon see EUA approval over the littlest things. I should have recognized that this may be the case with respect to these drugs, so thanks for pointing that out! It would be an interesting perspective to have when looking at what happens with Ozempic and the like.
The scary part is the sub rosa way Becerra did it--slipping a notice into the Federal Register with no fanfare. If people weren't already questioning the EUAs for the mRNA inoculations it probably would not have been noticed, and even as it was it was barely noticed.
Absolutely NOTHING stands between him and doing something similar for opioids, giving Ozempic and any other drug a back door into entirely new markets with virtually zero safety testing.
The last remaining circuit breaker to keep harmful therapeutics off the market has now been bypassed. Be afraid. Be very afraid.
There is another way. For weight control it involves avoiding foods to which the individual has become sensitized, and ensuring that what remains is of high quality. It's hard to see how experiments on rodents fed the usual crap-in-a-bag diets would ever shed light on any of this, any more than do RCTs employing one pharmaceutical as a "placebo" for comparison with another shed light on efficacy.
For addictions, and for weight control beyond what stems from bad food itself, there are other causes to consider, pharmaceutical consumption insufficiency not being one of them. A book that I read years ago comes to mind, _In the Realm of Hungry Ghosts_ by Gabor Maté and Peter A. Levine (2010). It speaks of the "hole in the soul" underlying addiction.
When dealing with "the diseases of [modern] civilization", the answer is not likely to be drugs. It would more likely -- for those not seeking a quick-and-dirty fix -- look like a return to something resembling what people ate and did before these diseases became epidemic, and what they still eat and do in some "less developed" parts of the world.
I think one facet to the obesity/ GLP-1 argument may lie in the microbiome. It's possible that poor diets may damage the microbiome and alter the cardiometabolic response including alterations in GLP-1 expression. The use of these sorts of drugs may be more of a compensatory mechanism for something that has been damaged. It's not necessarily that the answer is drugs, but what the drugs are doing, and why such a drug would be needed.
So I wouldn't argue that the answer to addiction may lie in pharmaceuticals, but pharmaceuticals are at least telling us something about the body's biochemistry may be off-kilter, and that may be worth looking into in order to figure out why.
A most excellent book. 🤗
Sounds great. But I thought it had a major side effect of potential bowel cancer?
Idk. I could be wrong.
So some searchers I came across raised the concern of possible pancreatic cancer. I didn't come across any in regards to bowel cancer. From the very quick glance I've seen of a meta-analysis they seem to argue that the rates of cancer don't pass the usual noise burden, but that doesn't mean that these drugs may not have an effect on cancer. The fact that the intestines produce GLP-1, and that the pancreas highly responds to GLP-1 sort of makes sense why these places may be possible organs of interest with respect to cancer formation with these drugs.
I think a more widespread concern could be the fact that these drugs may induce some form of tolerance in the same ways that diabetics experience tolerance to insulin. These drugs are designed to have far longer half-lives, and greater affinity to receptors as compared to their natural brothers, so longer, stronger activation of receptors may come with some unknown consequences.
I was just about to ask re side effects as I haven't had time to look at Oztempic in detail as yet. But I did remember reading something about "awesome new drug, but whoops! Sorry about the side order of cancer." Or something along those lines😉