Ozempic and similar weight loss drugs have been found to cut risks for a variety of health issues — ranging from heart to kidney disease — netting the pharma companies behind them billions of projected dollars in revenue over the next decade.
But in rare cases, this class of drugs called GLP-1 agonists can come with a debilitating side effects. Chief among them is blindness, which as Reuters reports has prompted patients who lost their eyesight to file more than 70 lawsuits against Novo Nordisk and Eli Lilly, the two major drug companies behind Ozempic and Mounjaro, respectively.
The lawsuits, in both federal and state courts, allege that these drugs gave patients a condition called non-arteritic anterior ischemic optic neuropathy, in which blood flow to the optic nerve stops and causes a person to lose vision.
Earlier this week, a federal judicial panel approved the consolidation of these lawsuits and that a Pennsylvania federal judge will preside over these cases — setting the stage for a legal showdown that could have immense implications for the future of the drugs, which have exploded in popularity over the past few years.
And the suits aren’t the only storm clouds on the horizon for GLP-1 manufacturers: they’re separate from another batch of litigation that alleges that these drugs can cause gastroparesis, in which the gastrointestinal tract stops moving food along for digestion.
The US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) approved the first GLP-1 agonist drug back in 2005 to treat diabetes. Fast forward to 2021, and the FDA gave Ozempic maker Novo Nordisk the greenlight to make and manufacture Wegovy, which works the same way as Ozempic but is geared towards people who want to lose weight.
That monumental decision, along with a rush of positive press, kicked off the current craze for these weight loss drugs, which has seen celebrities like Oprah and Rebel Wilson shed pounds over a short amount of time.
But in the last couple of years, a growing number of people have reported severe side effects from using these medications, dampening the buzz around drugs that have often been touted as a miracle cure for a wide variety of conditions — even aging.
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