A peer reviewed Criminology analysis of 821 GLP 1 users found current users showed a substantially weaker impulsivity to violence relationship than former users, though the authors stress cause and effect have not been proven.
A Rutgers University study published in the journal Criminology has found that U.S. adults currently taking GLP-1 receptor agonists, the drug class behind Ozempic and Wegovy, show a substantially weaker statistical relationship between impulsivity and self-reported violent behavior than those who once took the medications and stopped.
The finding, drawn from a 2025 survey of 7,521 American adults with a focused analysis of 821 people who reported current or past GLP-1 use, is the most striking result in a paper led by Daniel Semenza, director of research at the New Jersey Gun Violence Research Center and an associate professor at Rutgers School of Public Health. In a ScienceDaily summary of the research, Semenza described the weakening of the impulsivity to violence link among current users as the strongest finding in the study.
GLP-1 receptor agonists were originally developed to treat type 2 diabetes and are now widely prescribed for weight loss. The Rutgers paper extends a small but growing research conversation about what these drugs may be doing in the brain, beyond appetite and blood sugar. The analysis examined two violence-linked factors, impulsivity and alcohol use, and tracked how each related to self-reported violent behavior among current users, former users, and people who had never taken the drugs.
Violent behavior was measured using a validated self-report instrument covering fighting, assault, and robbery. Among current GLP-1 users, the well-established statistical relationship between impulsivity and violent behavior was substantially weaker than among former users. The pattern raises a question that has begun to surface in adjacent research: if GLP-1 medications blunt impulsivity in some people, could that have downstream effects on aggression, alcohol consumption, or other behaviors associated with harm?
The authors are explicit that the study does not establish that GLP-1 drugs reduce violence. The data are observational, drawn from a single year of self-reported survey responses. People who can access and afford GLP-1 medications, which carry list prices in the hundreds of dollars per month in the United States, differ systematically from those who cannot, on income, baseline health, healthcare access, and the underlying conditions that led to a prescription. Any of those differences, rather than the drug itself, could help explain why current and former users look different in the survey.
Selection effects cut both ways in this design. The comparison that drives the headline result is not current users versus never-users, but current users versus former users, a group that may include people who stopped because of side effects, cost, or changes in their health. The Rutgers team says cause and effect have not been proven and that the finding should be read as a signal, not a prescription.
Still, the result lands in a research landscape that has been moving in this direction. Animal studies and small clinical reports have suggested that GLP-1 receptor agonists can reduce alcohol consumption and certain compulsive behaviors, and the Rutgers paper frames the new finding as part of a broader effort to understand how a drug class designed to act on metabolism may also act on impulse control.
For now, the practical takeaway is narrow. The study does not support prescribing Ozempic or Wegovy to reduce violent behavior, and the authors do not recommend it. What it does support is a question worth taking seriously: whether the behavioral effects of GLP-1 medications, which tens of millions of adults are now taking for diabetes and obesity, extend further into the brain and into everyday behavior than the original clinical trials were designed to measure.