A woman prescribed Ozempic and Wegovy to lose weight is now suing the company that makes the drugs after losing her colon from complications she says they caused.
As CBS News reports, 62-year-old Juanita Gantt was first prescribed Wegovy, a weight loss injectible, and later the diabetes drug Ozempic. The active ingredient in both is semaglutide, which falls under the class of medications known as GLP-1s made by the Danish manufacturer Novo Nordisk.
Because she was considered obese and at risk for diabetes — though some reporting indicated the woman had already been diagnosed as a diabetic — her doctor told her she was a good candidate for the semaglutide-based drugs. (It's unclear whether Gantt was switched from Wegovy to Ozempic or if she'd been prescribed both concurrently, which would probably not be safe because they're simply different doses of the same substance.)
Initially, Gantt said she felt fine and was happy with the weight she'd lost — but in October 2023, several months into her semaglutide journey, her husband found her collapsed and unconscious on the floor.
"I had no idea what had happened to me," the Pennsylvania woman told CBS.
As she learned at the hospital, part of Gantt's colon had died and had to be removed. When she was recovering from surgery, she went into cardiac arrest, leading the hospital to call her daughter, telling her that her mother might die.
"Breaks my heart that my daughter got that phone call," the woman told the news broadcaster tearfully. "Horrible."
Gantt now has to wear an ileostomy bag to collect waste — and she believes Novo is to blame.
Though semaglutide comes with a laundry list of moderate-to-severe gastrointestinal side effects, including an FDA warning issued a month before Gantt's collapse about its potential to cause intestinal blockage, the woman says she's suing because she was not properly advised about the drug's potential to harm in that way.
"I had no warning that this was even a possibility," she said.
As Gantt's lawyer Parvin Aminolroaya suggested to CBS, Novo has favored profits over safety.
"[Novo has] put a lot of resources into marketing the drug, hundreds of millions of dollars to expand the market get new patients for the drug," the medical injury attorney said, "but it hasn't spent that money on warning patients of the risk of [the stomach paralysis syndrome] gastroparesis, ileus, small bowel obstruction, and the fact that these injuries can be severe, even if it's in a rare case."
While doctors can and should advise patients about the potential risks of any medication, Novo has drawn criticism by paying millions of dollars to doctors that have advocated for its drugs.
In a statement to CBS, the Danish pharmaceutical company said that Gantt's claims are "without merit" and noted that the drugs' FDA-approved warning labels do include lists of their "known risks."
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