Medications like Ozempic and Wegovy may be able to reduce both chronic and acute pain. This makes these types of drugs promising safer alternatives to聽pain聽treatments such as聽opioids, though the effect has yet to be demonstrated in humans.
Ozempic and Wegovy work by mimicking a hormone released after eating known as GLP-1, which reduces appetite and regulates blood sugar levels. While these medications are only approved for treating obesity and type 2 diabetes, a growing number of studies have shown that they could also help treat other conditions from Alzheimer鈥檚 disease to addiction.
Previous research has shown that animals experience less pain after eating, so at Gachon University in South Korea and his colleagues investigated whether GLP-1 could be mediating this effect.
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The researchers treated five mice with GLP-1 and then measured how quickly the animals retracted their paw from a heated surface. They found that, on average, mice kept their paw on the heated surface for roughly 1.25 times as long as they did when they weren鈥檛 treated with GLP-1. This wasn鈥檛 the case for a separate group of animals treated with salt water, suggesting the hormone reduces sensitivity to pain.
Measurements of neural activity revealed that GLP-1 blocks a receptor in nerves called TRPV1, which is crucial for eliciting pain. Kim and his team identified the molecule on GLP-1 that binds to this receptor and then treated six mice with a synthetic version of this molecule called exendin 9-39. On average, the animals took about 1.25 times as long to remove their paw from a hot beam of light when treated with the molecule than when they weren鈥檛. This effect persisted for up to 2 hours after the mice received treatment. Exendin 9-39 was also effective at treating other types of pain in mice, including nerve pain, inflammatory pain and chronic pain.
This molecule also didn鈥檛 produce any metabolic effects in the rodents, such as reducing blood sugar levels or dampening appetite. That is because it specifically targets TRPV1, says Kim, who presented these findings at an October meeting of the Society for Neuroscience in Chicago.
Past experimental drugs designed to act on TRPV1 have been shown to raise body temperature to dangerously high levels. Yet Kim and his team didn鈥檛 find this to be true in mice treated with exendin 9-39.
Together, these findings suggest that exendin 9-39 could be a safe and effective treatment for multiple types of pain, says Kim. Current pain medications, such as opioids, aren鈥檛 effective at treating chronic pain and come with serious side effects, such as a high risk of addiction.
This research also underscores just how much more we have to learn about the sweeping effects of drugs that mimic GLP-1, says at The Pennsylvania State University, who was not involved in the study. 鈥淏ecause GLP-1 is so effective at targeting the entire brain, there are also other things it could potentially be doing,鈥� she says.
Experimental & Molecular Medicine
Article amended on 15 November 2024
We corrected the name of the researcher and the nature of the synthetic molecule used in the research
