Ozempic and its ilk may do a lot of things, but raising the risk of suicide doesn’t appear to be one of them. Research out this week is the latest to find no evidence of a link between GLP-1 drugs and suicide.
Scientists at McGill University in Canada conducted the study, published Wednesday in the British Medical Journal. They tracked the health outcomes of UK residents, and failed to find an association between GLP-1 use and an increased risk of suicidality. The findings follow other major reports from the U.S. and European Union that reached a similar conclusion.
The research into a possible connection between GLP-1 use and suicide began nearly two years ago. In the summer of 2023, health regulators in the UK, Iceland and the EU reported receiving case reports tying the use of GLP-1 drugs to suicidal ideation. They announced they would conduct a review of the medication class, which is primarily used to treat type 2 diabetes and obesity. In early January 2024, the FDA updated its public list of potential new safety risks associated with approved drugs to include this potential risk.
It didn’t take too long for conflicting evidence to emerge, however. Later that January, for instance, the FDA announced that its own preliminary investigation failed to turn up any signal of an increased suicide risk. A February 2024 study also found that people who started taking GLP-1 drugs were less likely to be diagnosed with depression and anxiety later on, both key risk factors for suicide. And in April 2024, the EU’s nine-month probe similarly found no link between any GLP-1 drug, including semaglutide (the active ingredient in Ozempic and Wegovy), and suicide or ideation.
In this latest research, the McGill researchers analyzed medical records from hundreds of thousands of UK residents. They compared people who began taking GLP-1s for their diabetes to people taking two other major classes of diabetes drugs, looking specifically for reported outcomes related to suicidality—a broad category that includes suicidal ideation, self-harm, and completed suicides. All in all, they found no increased risk of suicidality in those on GLP-1 therapy compared to other medications. They also failed to find an association between suicidality and GLP-1 use even in people with a past history of psychiatric disorders or self-harm.
It can be very hard in science to truly prove a negative. And GLP-1 drugs certainly aren’t free of other (and rarely, very serious) side effects. But given all the data collected so far—including studies suggesting that semaglutide use specifically is linked to a lower risk of suicide ideation—the verdict looks to be swiftly in favor of no added suicide risk from using these drugs.
“These findings should provide some reassurance with respect to the psychiatric safety of these drugs,” the McGill researchers wrote.
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