Drug for alcohol use disorder helps obese mice lose weight

An off-label experiment has shown that disulfiram, a drug used to treat alcohol use disorder, normalized body weight in obese middle-aged mice. 

The study was led by the National Institute on Aging and published in the journal Cell Metabolism, according to a press release from the National Institutes of Health (NIH). 

The team took nine-month-old lab mice and fed them a high-fat diet for 12 weeks. This made the mice overweight and caused them to show signs of pre-diabetes, NIH reports. The scientists divided them into four smaller groups and fed them four different diets for an additional 12 weeks. One group was fed a standard diet, one a high-fat diet, one a high-fat diet with a low dose of disulfiram, one a high-fat diet with a high dose of disulfiram. 

The mice on the high-fat diet continued to gain weight. Those on the standard diet lost weight and their blood sugar levels normalized. The mice treated with disulfiram lost weight and showed less metabolic damage even though they were still consuming a high-fat diet. Mice on disulfiram were skinnier and had blood glucose levels that were similar to the levels of the mice on the standard diet. 

“When we first went down this path, we did not know what to expect, but once we started to see data showing dramatic weight loss and leaner body mass in the mice, we turned to each other and couldn’t quite believe our eyes,” Michael Bernier, PhD, NIA scientist said in the NIH release.

The benefits are suspected to come from disulfiram's anti-inflammatory properties, helping the mice avoid imbalances in fasting glucose and protecting them from damage from the fatty diet while improving metabolism, according to NIH.

Bernier and Rafael de Cabo, PhD, stress that these results are based on animal studies and cannot be projected into benefits for humans at this point.