Anti-obesity drugs tied to lower risk of suicidal thoughts or attempts among young people - study

The latest study to assess the psychiatric dangers from the to reverse obesity pills signifies young people taking the medication are unlikely to have suicidal thoughts or actions.

In January this year the European Medical Agency said that there is no connection between GLP-1 receptor agonists – the class of drugs used to manage weight and diabetes that includes Wegovy and Ozempic – and suicidal thoughts or actions, but the authors of the presented work still cautiously assessed how they can empower particular categories of patients, including adolescents, subjects on other medications, and patients with mental disorders.

That’s where the new study which was conducted by researchers from the royal children’s hospital in Melbourne, Australia and aoahealth has come in. 

Scientists looked at mental health data for 6,935 adolescents who were obese and between 12 and 18 years old, or mostly adolescents in the United States.

Half the patients received the drugs, while the other half received a lifestyle management instead – for instance being told to go on a diet and exercise.

Three years later at most, if patients had taken the drug, they were 33 percent less likely to have had thoughts of suicide or suicide attempts as the lifestyle one.

Nonetheless, the researchers noted that their result should be taken with a pinch of salt.

“Although our study provides some comfort, these findings can’t and should not be considered as conclusive and are presented as the first step to establishing the risk-benefit balance of the GLP-1 receptor agonists in this sensitive population,” Dr Liya Kerem – a paediatric endocrinologist at Hadassah University Medical Center in Jerusalem, who led the work on the research, said to Euronews Health.

The drugs help reduce patients’ appetites and are used within the EU as an obesity treatment and for type 2 diabetes.

It has also evidenced the decrease of heart failure incidence and some issues are still lack of understanding: long-term effect, side effects.

Kerem said that although she used body mass index (BMI), prior psychiatric diagnosis, and sociodemographic variables in analysis, it was unknown if the differences in suicidality proneness were because of the “drug itself or simply because BMI was lowered.”

It has been found out that no ‘risk of suicide ‘exists.

Meanwhile, Dr Riccardo De Giorgi, a clinical lecturer in the University of Oxford’s psychiatry department who was not involved in the study, noted that the actual number of suicidal events – either thoughts or attempts – was quite low in both groups: 50 amongst those patients taking the drugs and 78 amongst those with the lifestyle Intervention.

That is not unusual since “when you do these kinds of studies, suicidality is luckily a rare occurrence, but that is crucial when we have to be cautious on how such results are analyzed,” De Giorgi told Euronews Health.

In the same patient dataset as the new analysis, De Giorgi published a paper in August, which found that semaglutide, a type of GLP-1 agonist, was not linked with a higher risk of neurological and psychiatric side effects compared with other diabetes medications.

On balance, he added, “it convinces me that there is no increased risk of suicidal behaviour rather there is a reduced risk of suicidal behaviour” with weight loss drugs.

The next stage for research, in the view of De Giorgi, is to ascertain whether these medicines can or have led to notions of suicide or suicide attempts among those that are mentally challenged with a propensity to engage in self harming behaviors.

“We cannot yet know if these results could be applied to what we may define as post-psychiatry populations,” he said.