Semaglutide may reduce opioid overdoses, a new study suggests 

A wildly popular diabetes and weight-loss drug may also protect people from overdosing on opioids.

That’s the implication of a new study that examined health records of people with type 2 diabetes and opioid use disorder. People prescribed semaglutide, which is sold under the brand names Ozempic and Wegovy, were roughly one-third to one-half as likely to overdose on opioids during a one-year follow-up as people prescribed a different diabetes drug. 

“It’s a big decrease,” says Rong Xu, an AI and biomedical researcher at Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland whose team reports the findings September 25 in JAMA Network Open.