Public health
As millions of individuals take these drugs, problems, even rare, can affect many people, says researcher
Injectable diabetes medicines that have become widely used for weight loss, such as the drugs Ozempic, Saxenda and Victoza, can cause serious digestive problems in a small proportion of their users, according to a study published by researchers at Columbia University British, Canadian, scientific journal Journal of the American Medical Association O Jama . The side effects that had an increased risk were stomach paralysis, pancreatitis and intestinal obstructions.
These events are rare – in the case of Ozempic, which is the most popular of these drugs, only 1% of patients suffered stomach paralysis. But because these drugs are currently consumed by millions of people, the complications are not just anecdotal, the study says. “A 1% risk translates into many people who can suffer these events,” epidemiologist Mahyar Etminan, lead author of the study, told CNN.
The main objective of the work was to evaluate the incidence of adverse effects in those who take these drugs with the aim of losing weight. A fraction of patients with diabetes who use injectable medicines suffer gastrointestinal problems, but, as diabetes itself can influence these conditions, it was not known whether such effects were due to the medicines and were also repeated in obese patients without diabetes. The conclusion is that, even for non-diabetics, there is a small increased risk of developing pancreatitis, intestinal obstruction and stomach paralysis, but not for biliary diseases such as gallbladder inflammation.
The work reached these conclusions after analyzing records from a database of health plan patients in the United States. Information from 4,757 users of two classes of these injectable medicines, semaglutide and liraglutide, was compared with that of 654 users of another category of weight loss medicine, the combination of naltrexone with the bupropion which is sold in tablets.
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