Weight loss drugs can make people less inclined to exercise
Me 3645 Studio/Getty Images
Semaglutide – drug in the same medication Ozempic and Wegovy – Causes mice to exercise less. The findings suggest that these weight loss medications reduce people’s motivation to work.
Semaglutide helps treat type 2 diabetes and obesity by mimicking a hormone called GLP-1, which regulates blood sugar and suppresses appetite. GLP-1 also slows the activity of brain regions involved in reward processing and cravings. This may explain why people taking semaglutide-based medications do not find eating as rewarding or pleasurable as before taking the medication. Also, some studies have indicated that semaglutide may help treat it substance use disorders as well
Ralph DiLeone At Yale University and his colleagues, they wanted to know whether semaglutide also induces other rewarding behaviors, such as physical exercise. which improves mood and memory. So they treated seven mice for a week with semaglutide and an equal number with a placebo, and measured how far the animals traveled on an exercise wheel every day.
On average, those treated with semaglutide walked half the distance of those given placebo, suggesting they may be less motivated to exercise.
To further validate this, the researchers treated a separate group of 15 mice with semaglutide and another equally sized group with a placebo for five days and tested their willingness to exercise on a wheel. However, this time, the exercise wheel periodically locked while the animals were running on it. To unlock it, the mice had to press a lever with their nose. Each time the wheel locked, it became progressively more difficult to unlock, requiring the mice to press the lever more times. “Eventually they gave up,” says DiLeon, who presented the findings Oct. 7 at the Society for Neuroscience meeting in Chicago. “We call that the break point, and it gives us a proxy for how motivated they are to get into the running wheels.”
The maximum number of times the semaglutide-treated mice pressed the lever was, on average, 25 percent less than that of the control group animals. The researchers repeated the experiment with obese mice and found similar results.
Together, these findings suggest that semaglutide-based medications such as Ozempic or Wegovy can be reduced motivation to exercisesimilar to how they reduce cravings for food or drugs. However, there has been no evidence that this is the case for people, says DiLeon. This may be because most of the data from Wegovy and Ozempic come from people enrolled in weight-loss programs that include exercise, he says.
However, these findings underscore the potential of these drugs to interfere with positive behaviors, not just negative ones. “(This) data suggests that there are still motivated behaviors that can be changed (with semaglutide) that we haven’t asked about yet.” he says Karolina Skibicka at Pennsylvania State University.
Topics:
