Ozempic was supposed to be a gut story. Then Allison Shapiro looked at the brain scans.An assistant professor at the University of Colorado Anschutz, she was part of a team studying 13 teens and young women with a hormonal disorder affecting the ovaries who were put on GLP-1 drugs. As part of testing to catalogue the effect of the medication on their bodies, Shapiro took snapshots of their brains before and after.Subscribe to The Post Most newsletter for the most important and interesting stories from The Washington Post. AdvertisementAdvertisementShe was astonished to find extensive changes.Within only a few months, the brain connections in the salience network, which helps target attention, had multiplied.“We didn’t expect to see this effect, and we really don’t know what it means,” Shapiro said.Ozempic and other GLP-1 drugs were initially understood as a metabolism breakthrough: medicines that act like hormones to control hunger, blood sugar and weight. But as researchers probe deeper into how the drugs work, early evidence suggests that GLP-1s may also be reshaping parts of the brain.Tens of millions of people are now taking the medications worldwide, turning what began as an obesity and diabetes treatment into what could be modern medicine’s largest unplanned neuroscience experiments.AdvertisementAdvertisementScientists are studying GLP-1 drugs – medications that mimic the hormones involved in appetite, blood sugar and digestion – for how they affect not only eating behavior, but also addiction, cognition, neurodegeneration and even motivation and pleasure. The category includes older diabetes drugs that researchers have studied for decades; newer medications such as Ozempic and Wegovy, which contain semaglutide; and Mounjaro and Zepbound, which contain tirzepatide – a newer compound that targets both GLP-1 and a second metabolic hormone known as GIP, a distinction some scientists believe may matter neurologically.The emerging research on GLP-1s is part of a larger scientific shift away from treating brain and physical health as separate domains. Increasingly, researchers see them as tightly intertwined.Exercise is associated with sharper cognition, stronger memory and better executive function across a person’s lifespan, probably because it enhances neural activation and plasticity – the brain’s capacity to adapt and reorganize itself. Diet exerts its own influence; eating balance …
