Real-World Analysis of Semaglutide and Naltrexone for Alcohol Reduction, Anxiety Relief, and Side Effects Using Self-Reported Data from Reddit

BackgroundThere is an increasing rate of comorbidity with alcoholism and mental health disorders such as anxiety disorders, especially among young adults, the demographic with the largest proportion of heavy drinkers. This study compares semaglutide, a GLP-1 drug, and naltrexone, which is FDA-approved for treating alcoholism, in treating comorbid alcoholism and anxiety using self-reported data from Reddit posts.MethodsReddit API was used to extract Reddit posts relating either of the drugs (naltrexone and semaglutide) to either of the disorders (alcoholism and anxiety) as well as posts discussing the side effects of each drug. A script was created in Python to use Reddit API and automatically label the posts using a list of keywords, which was developed by running the script and manually checking portions of the data. For each drug, the effectiveness in treating a disorder was compared to ineffectiveness, and low/moderate side effects were compared to high side effects. The Chi-square test was applied to check for significance.ResultsAn analysis of 1,214 posts showed that Semaglutide was more effective than naltrexone at treating alcoholism as 100% of posts reported semaglutide to be effective compared to 75.67% of posts for naltrexone. Although the percentage of posts reporting the effectiveness of naltrexone for anxiety was greater at 68.97% compared to 63.83% for semaglutide, a chi-square test found that these differences were not statistically significant. Semaglutide had less intense side effects than naltrexone as 63.76% of the posts discussing semaglutide side effects found them to have a high intensity compared to 73.14% of posts discussing naltrexone side effects.ConclusionWith the rising comorbid condition of anxiety with alcoholism, semaglutide is a promising alternative to naltrexone for treating patients with alcoholism. It also appears to be a safer alternative, which could encourage more people to seek out treatment. Future studies can conduct clinical trials with treatment-seeking patients to affirm it, especially for comparing the two drugs for alcohol effectiveness. Other GLP-1 drugs and other mental health disorders in alcoholism comorbidities should also be explored.