GOTHENBURG, Sweden — For years, patients taking the new generation of weight-loss drugs have told their doctors something that was not on the label: they no longer felt like drinking. On Friday, the largest randomized trial to test that observation reported that the effect is real, and substantial.
In the study, published in The Lancet Psychiatry, 412 adults with moderate to severe alcohol use disorder at six Swedish clinics were given weekly injections of either semaglutide, a GLP-1 receptor agonist sold for diabetes and obesity, or a placebo for 26 weeks. All also received standard counseling. By the end, those on the drug reported 38 percent fewer heavy-drinking days than at the start, compared with a 17 percent reduction in the placebo group. Blood markers of alcohol consumption fell in step.
“The patients were not trying to lose weight, and most did not have diabetes,” said Karin Ljungqvist, a psychiatrist at the University of Gothenburg who led the trial. “What they told us, again and again, was that the third glass stopped being interesting. The craving simply did not arrive.”
The result is notable because treatment options for alcohol dependence have barely changed in a generation. The three medications approved in Europe have modest effects and are prescribed to fewer than one in ten patients who might benefit. Alcohol is linked to about 290,000 deaths a year in the E.U.
GLP-1 drugs act on receptors in the gut and brain that regulate appetite, and animal studies have long suggested they also dampen the brain’s reward response to alcohol and other substances. Smaller human trials had produced mixed results, partly because many enrolled people who were not heavy drinkers to begin with.
Dieter Mahlberg, a professor of addiction medicine at Heidelberg University who was not involved in the trial, called the findings “the most convincing evidence so far,” but cautioned that 26 weeks is short in a chronic, relapsing disease. “We do not know what happens when the drug stops,” he said. “And we do not know whether the drinking returns, or returns worse.” About 19 percent of participants on the drug dropped out, most citing nausea.
A 47-year-old participant from Borås who asked to be identified only as Anders said he had entered the trial after two failed attempts at abstinence. “I was drinking a bottle of wine most nights for ten years,” he said. “After about a month I noticed I had opened a bottle on Friday and it was still there on Sunday. I had never seen that in my own kitchen.”
Dr. Ljungqvist said a follow-up study tracking participants for two years is underway, and that an application to extend the drug’s approved uses would depend on it. “We are a long way from prescribing this routinely,” she said. “But for the first time in my career, I think we are on the road.”
A version of this article appears in print on Oct. 11, 2026, Section A, Page 16 of the European edition with the headline: In a Swedish Trial, a Weight-Loss Drug Cut Heavy Drinking by More Than a Third.
