Can Weight Loss Drugs Reduce Dementia Risk?

Weight loss drugs like Ozempic and Mounjaro are very popular right now. By inhibiting the GLP-1 receptors in your body, they turn off your appetite.

That little voice in your head that says “just one more cookie. It won’t hurt” becomes silent.

Sounds wonderful, right?

Maybe not so much. There are side effects. Here are some of the side effects I found:

• Muscle loss

• Pancreatic cancer

• Heart issues

• Bowel obstruction

• Gastroparesis (hard to eat because the stomach is constantly full)

• Biliary disease (painful gallstones)

Recently there have been some claims made that the weight loss drugs can also lower your risk of dementia.

The study that made this claim reviewed 26 clinical trials involving over 160,000 men and women with Type 2 diabetes who were taking various drugs to lower high blood sugar, or glucose.

They claimed the GLP-1 inhibitors reduced your risk of dementia by 45%.

GLP-1 is very common in the brain. It is very protective of all kinds of brain cells and reduces neuronal apoptosis (programmed cell death). Diseases like Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s speed up cell death.

The drugs have also been linked to improvements in heart, liver and kidney disease. They may even prolong lifespan.

I’m not totally against these drugs. They have their place. Especially if you can take the lowest effective dose and do your best to stop taking them as soon as you see the results.

What I find interesting is the conditions these drugs supposedly improve. The primary reason doctors prescribe drugs like Ozempic is not weight loss.

It’s Type 2 diabetes.

In addition to turning off your appetite, GLP-1 inhibitors increase your pancreas’ production of insulin, decreases the liver’s release of sugar and slows digestion to prevent blood sugar spikes.

In other words, it tries to make you less diabetic.

Now consider that people often call Alzheimer’s Type 3 diabetes. Or if you have diabetes your risk of these conditions increases:

• Heart issues - 2 to 4 times increase in cardiovascular disease

• Liver disease - Up to 70% of people with Type 2 diabetes also have Metabolic-dysfunction associated steatotic liver disease (MASLD)

• Kidney disease - About 1 in 3 people with diabetes have chronic kidney disease

No wonder they tout the GLP-1 inhibitors as these wonder drugs that can help with all sorts of chronic conditions. The real connection is that all these chronic conditions are linked to diabetes and insulin resistance.

Yet when people are diagnosed with these chronic conditions, many doctors don’t link them to a poor diet or insulin resistance.

Instead they give people statins for heart disease, amyloid-blocking medications for Alzheimer’s, diurectics or beta-blockers for liver disease and ACE inhibitors and even statins for kidney disease.

Maybe one of the best advantages of the popularity of GLP-1’s will be the linkage between insulin resistance and so many other chronic diseases - not just diabetes.

And then maybe more and more people may start looking at their diet to improve their conditions instead of pharmaceuticals.

Or am I just engaged in wishful thinking?