Be careful with weight loss drugs
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Yikes.
Lawsuits are piling up against major GLP-1 makers Eli Lilly and Novo Nordisk as more patients accuse popular drugs like Ozempic and Zepbound of permanently damaging their eyesight.
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OMG!
a 63-year-old man was prescribed Ozempic to manage his diabetes in 2023 and woke up four months later with loss of vision in one eye. He continued taking the medication, not knowing it had been linked to vision problems in some clinical trials and studies, and lost sight in his other eye in October 2024.
"Now legally blind, Engel has had to quit his job and give up his commercial driver’s license. He can’t see his grandkids play baseball, he said, and the couple has shelved much of their retirement travel bucket list," USA TODAY reported.
Ok, also this:
There is currently not enough research to definitively establish a cause-and-effect relationship between GLP-1s and NAION or other vision changes.
But seriously, these glp-1 drugs are so new, doctors should be more cautious about prescribing them, and any new illness or symptom in a person on a glp-1 maybe should lead to increased scrutiny of possible connections.
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OMG!
a 63-year-old man was prescribed Ozempic to manage his diabetes in 2023 and woke up four months later with loss of vision in one eye. He continued taking the medication, not knowing it had been linked to vision problems in some clinical trials and studies, and lost sight in his other eye in October 2024.
"Now legally blind, Engel has had to quit his job and give up his commercial driver’s license. He can’t see his grandkids play baseball, he said, and the couple has shelved much of their retirement travel bucket list," USA TODAY reported.
Ok, also this:
There is currently not enough research to definitively establish a cause-and-effect relationship between GLP-1s and NAION or other vision changes.
But seriously, these glp-1 drugs are so new, doctors should be more cautious about prescribing them, and any new illness or symptom in a person on a glp-1 maybe should lead to increased scrutiny of possible connections.
But seriously, these glp-1 drugs are so new, doctors should be more cautious about prescribing them, and any new illness or symptom in a person on a glp-1 maybe should lead to increased scrutiny of possible connections.
They’re over 20 years old. It’s just that prescribing them for weight loss is newish. Used to be just diabetes.
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I strongly suspect that the risk to your health of obesity greatly exceeds the risk of this potential side effect if it is one.
I’m probably more attuned to thinking about relative risks with medications given that I take drugs known to cause chronic kidney disease (with utter certainty, the only question is severity) and increase my skin cancer risk by 100x (not a typo). My alternative would be to die in a couple of months as my body rejects my lungs.
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I strongly suspect that the risk to your health of obesity greatly exceeds the risk of this potential side effect if it is one.
I’m probably more attuned to thinking about relative risks with medications given that I take drugs known to cause chronic kidney disease (with utter certainty, the only question is severity) and increase my skin cancer risk by 100x (not a typo). My alternative would be to die in a couple of months as my body rejects my lungs.
They’re over 20 years old. It’s just that prescribing them for weight loss is newish. Used to be just diabetes.
Wow, I didn’t know that! I knew that expanding them to general weight loss came after their use for diabetes, but I thought the drugs themselves were truly new.
I strongly suspect that the risk to your health of obesity greatly exceeds the risk of this potential side effect if it is one.
Probably. Still, if someone isn’t diabetic and is just taking the drugs for weight loss, they ought to know whether it incurs an increase in this kind of risk that they wouldn’t otherwise have.
I’m probably more attuned to thinking about relative risks with medications
I would imagine!
given that I take drugs known to cause chronic kidney disease (with utter certainty, the only question is severity) and increase my skin cancer risk by 100x (not a typo).
I didn’t realize that! Are there things you can do to mitigate these risks?
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The white paper for Valproic Acid used to say:
Possible side effects include a- h, instant death, etc
My favorite possible side effects white paper of all time.
I just wanted to say a type of medication that might be safe for one person might not be safe for someone else.
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I remembered that a NY Times columnist, Frank Bruni, experienced vision loss from NAION, as the result of a stroke. He wrote eloquently about it in a couple of columns, but I wasn’t able to find them in a search of the Times website. Bruni did, however, write a book about the experience.
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I remembered that a NY Times columnist, Frank Bruni, experienced vision loss from NAION, as the result of a stroke. He wrote eloquently about it in a couple of columns, but I wasn’t able to find them in a search of the Times website. Bruni did, however, write a book about the experience.
@RealPlayer I didn’t know that, but I just googled and it said that he lost vision permanently in one eye and was told there’s a chance that it could happen in the other eye (although it has not yet).
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