Novo Nordisk’s obesity medication Wegovy helped people with alcoholism reduce their drinking in the first controlled study of patients actively seeking treatment for addiction. Volunteers on Wegovy reported drinking heavily for five days in a 30-day period after six months of treatment—12 fewer days than before starting the medication.
The 108-person study, conducted in Denmark, showed improvement across multiple alcohol-related measures. “This was totally the dream scenario,” said Mette Kruse Klausen, a doctor and researcher at the Mental Health Center Copenhagen and one of the study leaders. “This is very robust results because it’s significant on all the alcohol parameters that we collected.” The research was published in The Lancet.
Based on the study results, approximately one in four people treated with Wegovy would reduce two notches on the World Health Organization scale for high-risk drinking, compared to one in seven for current treatments or fewer. The Danish study marked the first time researchers used a randomized, placebo-controlled method to examine Wegovy’s impact on alcoholism in treatment-seeking patients.
People who received a dummy injection also reduced drinking to nine days in a 30-day period, likely reflecting therapeutic benefits from group access to evidence-based treatment. Anders Fink-Jensen, University of Copenhagen professor overseeing the study, noted, “I would really expect if we had a more real-life setup, the placebo effect would be much less and you’d have more drug effect.”
A larger Phase 3 trial run by the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs is set to start in the summer with results expected by 2028. Additional studies will examine Wegovy in non-obese individuals with alcoholism and tablet formulations of the medication. Lorenzo Leggio, a physician-scientist at the National Institutes of Health leading one upcoming trial, called the Danish results “very timely, very important, very impactful.”
This article is an AI-assisted summary. All facts and figures are drawn from the original report: https://www.troyrecord.com/2026/05/01/wegovy-alcohol-addiction/