Could Ozempic Help Prevent Dementia?

0:00Hairblazer, let's talk about something that has been showing up a lot in my inbox lately. You've probably seen the headlines, Ozempic, Wagovi, Manjaro. These medications are everywhere right now. And in the last year or two, researchers have noticed something interesting. They've noticed that the people taking these drugs seem to be getting diagnosed with Alzheimer's at much lower rates. We're talking 40 to 70 % lower. Now that's a number that will make you stop and pay attention. But here's the thing. A clinical trial came out this year that completely changed the picture. And if you've only been seeing the hopeful headlines, you have not seen the full story.

0:44And that's what I want to do. I want to give you the full story because I've been learning myself and that's what we deserve. Careblazer, real quick. If you learn better by watching things, then you can hop on over to my YouTube channel where I post these podcasts in video format, sometimes have different visuals to help people learn even better. You can just type in Care Blazers into YouTube and I will pop up. All right, let's get back to today's podcast. So let's start at the beginning. In October 2024, researchers published a study. They looked at health records of over 1 million people with type 2 diabetes, and they compared two groups.

1:23The people who were taking a semi-glutide, that happens to be the active ingredient in those medications I mentioned. And then people who were taking other medications for diabetes, not the semiglutide. And what they found was striking. The people who were on the semiglutide were significantly less likely to be diagnosed with Alzheimer's disease. And that 40 to 70 % lower risk of Alzheimer's disease, that held up across different ages, across both men and women, regardless of whether somebody was obese or not. So a lot of people, these drugs have really made the market and made it to be where all of us have heard about it because so many people are losing weight by taking this drug.

2:06People who have had struggles losing weight for many, many years are now injecting themselves with this medication and losing weight pretty easily. So this is considered an observational study, which means that researchers were just watching what would happen with the people out in the real world. That is very different from a controlled experiment in a controlled environment. So once researchers saw this, they started really asking themselves, could a diabetes drug have anything to do with Alzheimer's disease? Could it have anything to do with preventing, reducing Alzheimer's dementia? So why would a diabetes drug potentially be a protection for the brain?

2:46Now, you may have heard this before. Some people have referred to type 3 diabetes. They have referred to dementia potentially being like a type 3 diabetes. Here's what they mean. In type 2 diabetes, your body becomes resistant to insulin. Insulin is supposed to be used to help your body produce glucose, their energy source, and in type 2 diabetes, the cells stop responding to it properly. Now, here's the interesting part. Your brain uses insulin too. Your brain relies on insulin signaling to get energy, to keep connections strong, to clear out toxic proteins. And for many people with Alzheimer's disease, that process breaks down.

3:27The brain itself in some ways becomes insulin resistant. And some researchers, because of that, have started talking about dementia as a type 3 diabetes, meaning the metabolic problem has reached the brain. Now, not every researcher calls it this, but this is something you've probably heard. It's been coming up more and more. So now these GLP-1 medications like Ozempic, researchers are finding that GLP-1 receptors are not just something that are in the pancreas. They're finding that these receptors are also in the brain, specifically in the hippocampus, the brain's memory center. And when these medications activate their receptors inside the hippocampus, it does two very important things.

4:10One, it might reduce brain inflammation, which we know is one of the hallmarks of Alzheimer's disease. Two, they might help the brain use energy more efficiently, basically improving insulin signaling in the brain. There's also some early animal research studies that are showing that these medications can help reduce the toxic buildup of proteins in the brain. That hasn't been proven in humans yet, but that's promising. So in March of this year, 2026, two large clinical trials were published in the Lancet. They are called the EVOC and the EVOKE PLUS trials. And this was the gold standard. This was a controlled experiment.

4:48So researchers took 3 ,808 people who already had Alzheimer's disease and early stages Alzheimer's disease. They confirmed that they had it through amyloid testing. And that's basically the most rigorous way we can show that somebody actually has Alzheimer's disease. They took those individuals and gave half of them an oral semiglutide and the other half a placebo, which is a sugar pill, not really supposed to do anything. And they tracked these people for two years. The result, no significant difference. There were some interesting changes that suggest the medication is doing something on a biological level, but those changes did not translate into slower cognitive decline.

5:36And Novo Nordisk, the company that makes semiglutide, ended their Alzheimer's treatment program after the results of this study. But this isn't the end of the story. Here's what I really want you to know. The clinical trial that I just described, the one that came back negative and said there was no difference between the people who were on the medication and the people who were not, that was testing whether the medication could slow down Alzheimer's and people who already had it. The disease was already there. It was confirmed in their brains. The observational data study, the one I talked about at the very beginning of this video, the one with a million patients, they were looking at something completely different.

6:12It was asking, do people who take this medication seem over time to be less likely to develop Alzheimer's disease? Basically, by taking the medication, could it potentially help prevent somebody from developing Alzheimer's in the first place? That's a meaningful distinction. Think about it this way. So Alzheimer's disease was already in the brain, meaning the neurons have already started dying and connections have already started breaking down. And so a drug that improves the metabolic signaling in the brain, it might not be able to reverse that damage. But if you intervene before that cascade begins, maybe that's a different story.

6:53If the brain is still intact and you support the brain earlier before disease has entered the brain, well, that's a completely different question. So what researchers are saying now is that there is a window, and the window where these medications matter. We're talking prevention, not treatment, specifically prevention in people with metabolic risk factors like diabetes. So the question's still open. The clinical trials to question that have not been tested yet. So what does this mean for you if your loved one already has Alzheimer's? The clinical evidence right now does not support that these medications are a way to slow the disease.

7:31Please do not just adjust anybody's medications based on this YouTube video or what I am saying. I am just learning right alongside with you and sharing the research. This is not clinical treatment information. This is just information. And you can ask your doctor follow-up questions if you would like. But if your loved one is already on one of these medications for diabetes, this is not a reason to stop it. again, don't make any medical decisions based on these videos. If you're a caregiver yourself and you have metabolic risk factors like diabetes, then this might be something to think about and talk to your doctor about.

8:05The observational data on using a semiglutide for Alzheimer's disease prevention is interesting. It's hopeful. It's a conversation worth having with your doctor. And for all of us, the research is doing exactly what it's supposed to doing. It saw a signal and now it is following it up and it is testing that signal to figure out where this might lead. How can we see some benefit from it? And before I close, I want to share something with you a little bit more personal here in the Careblazer community. Every single week, I have an email newsletter that goes out. It's called the Dementia Dose. And in that newsletter, I share tips and strategies, thoughts, helpful information every single Thursday.

8:45But what we've been starting to do is we've been putting a poll inside of our emails just to see what our community is feeling about what's going on about a variety of different topics. And this past week, the poll question I asked was, when it comes to dementia treatments and research, how do you usually feel? Now, technically, the poll is still open for three more days. However, right now, at the time that I am recording this video, we have, so the question is when it comes to dementia treatments and research, how do you usually feel? 12.2 % hopeful, 4.6 % confused, 44.9 % skeptical, and 38.3 % a mix of all three.

9:26What we see here is that the winner by far is skeptical. Over almost 45 % of all respondents said they feel skeptical about all the new headlines and research on dementia treatments and research, with a very close 38 % on a mix of all three, confused, skeptical, hopeful. Careblazers, I hope this helped clear up some confusion. We know that the news thrives on catchy headlines. One day it feels like they're saying we found a new miracle drug. The next week, that's not so great. The truth is it's somewhere in the middle most of the time. And I hope that this video helps clear it up. If you want to join our Dementia Dose newsletter, it's totally free.

10:06You can go online or you can go to careblazers.com forward slash Dementia Dose and sign up there where I share a bunch more and you can participate in our community polling and see how other people are voting. All right, sending you love. Bye.