“This is such a serious sort of potential complication that everybody who takes this drug should know about it,” said Dr. Ion Hobai, an anesthesiologist at Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston, who was among the first to flag the issue.
Nearly 6 million prescriptions for the class of drugs that include Wegovy and Ozempic were written between January and May in the U.S. for people who don’t have diabetes, according to Komodo Health, a health care technology company. The drugs induce weight loss by mimicking the actions of hormones, found primarily in the gut, that kick in after people eat.
“When 90% of it is gone, which is after three weeks, hopefully everything should go back to normal,” Jones said. Since then, doctors have seen dozens of similar cases as use of the weight-loss medication has grown, said Dr. Elisa Lund, an anesthesiologist at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill School of Medicine. “It has exponentially increased,” she said.
Novo Nordisk, which makes Ozempic, Wegovy and similar drugs, said the firm’s clinical trial and post-marketing safety data did not show that the medications led to aspiration. But the drugmaker noted that the medications are known to cause delayed emptying of the stomach and that the labels warn of possible gastrointestinal side effects.
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