As weight loss jabs like Ozempic and Wegovy become ever more popular, doctors are growing increasingly concerned about their gnarly side effects.
As Germany's Deutsche Welle notes, people who take glucagon-like peptide-1 (GLP-1) agonist/receptors, the class of drugs that the popular shots fall under, have reported everything from stomach issues and vision changes to erectile dysfunction and even suicide.
Though clinical trials for these kinds of drugs didn't report tons of adverse effects, King's College London physician Penny Ward explained in an interview with DW that real-world patients will often experience more — and more disparate — side effects after trials have concluded.
"Rarer side effects may emerge as more patients take these medicines in clinical practice, simply as a result of the much larger number of people treated than were included in the clinical development trials," the doctor noted. "This is why we continue to monitor the safety of medicines on the market."
In the few years since GLP-1s have flooded the market, changed American food consumption, and utterly upended the weight loss industry, a handful of studies have looked into some of their scarier side effects — and their results aren't exactly inspiring.
Last summer, Harvard researchers revealed a troubling link between semaglutide, the active ingredient in Ozempic and Wegovy, and non-arteritic anterior ischemic optic neuropathy (NAION), a condition that blocks blood flow to the eyes and can cause blindness. In that study, people with diabetes who take semaglutide were found to be four times more likely to develop NAION than the average person — and although there are some complicating factors, that's nothing to scoff at.
More recently, doctors at Washington University in St. Louis found that people who take GLP-1s have increased rates of kidney problems and pancreatitis — a disorder that the United Kingdom's medical regulator has, separately, begun investigating.
While there's tons of studies into the constellation of health benefits these drugs can have outside of weight loss, there hasn't been as much research into their of adverse effects — and what's already out there might not represent the full population of people who take them.
Though women make up an estimated 65 percent of GLP-1 users in the United States, per the healthcare market analysis group Real Chemistry, there have only been a few studies that take into account how different genders respond to the drugs. According to Karolina Skibicka, a neuroendocrinologist from the University of Calgary in Canada, that's a problem.
"We need studies which include women," Skibicka told DW. "Women show unique side-effects to many pharmacotherapies, and still [in] most studies women are often underrepresented at various stages of testing."
Though the Canadian neuroendocrinologist still believes that the "list of benefits for this drug, if taken as prescribed, is still significantly longer and more impactful than risks," doctors and patients alike need to be able to make that cost-benefit analysis together.
And without sufficient study into risks, that analysis is skewed in the favor of high-grossing drug manufacturers — which is bad news for the people who may bear the brunt of these potentially serious side effects.
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