Publisher Health

People taking the wildly popular drugs Ozempic, to treat diabetes, and Wegovy, to combat obesity, are slightly less likely to have suicidal thoughts who are not taking them, researchers reported on Friday.

Millions of people take Ozempic and Wegovy, which are considered to be among the biggest blockbusters in medical history. But last year a European drug safety agency said it was investigating whether the drugs cause suicidal thoughts. The new study, published in the journal Nature Medicine, was funded by the National Institutes of Health and used a huge population. The findings provide data that may potentially reassure people who take the drugs.

Novo Nordisk, maker of the drugs, had no role in the study, and the study’s investigators had no conflicts of interest.

The investigators used anonymized electronic health records from a database of 100.8 million people. That allowed them to look at two groups: 240,618 who were prescribed Wegovy or other weight loss drugs, and 1,589,855 who were prescribed Ozempic or other medicines to lower their blood sugar. Suicidal thoughts were included in patients’ records as part of routine monitoring of their health.

The investigators compared the incidence of suicidal thoughts in people who were taking the drugs with the incidence among similar people who were not taking them but were taking other weight loss and anti-diabetes medications. They also asked if there was an increase in the recurrence of suicidal thoughts among those taking the drugs who had previously reported thoughts of suicide.

The database’s size allowed the researchers to look at subgroups such as sex, race and age groups.

“No matter how hard we tried we did not see any increased risk,” said Rong Xu, director of the Center for Artificial Intelligence in Drug Discovery at Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland.