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Ozempic linked to stomach paralysis, other gastrointestinal issues: UBC study

• deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
• great_psy 3y ago
  [flagged]
  • klipklop 3y ago
    Not sure why people are downvoting, these drugs are a major threat to the fast/junk food industry. If these drugs continue being used we might have reached “peak calorie” consumption in the west. There are a lot of scaremongering articles for this class of drugs. The media constantly runs articles to scare people out of taking it. Gastroparesis is often mentioned. You know what often causes this? Being obese and having diabetes. The question is do these drugs make that more likely to happen.. In the meantime I’ll let other people beta test these drugs on my behalf.
    • deleted 3y ago
      [deleted]
    • ethanbond 3y ago
      Surely there's no way that the food industry will figure out a way to pack more flavor and more psychological satisfaction into less nutritious, less satiating forms, right?
  • morkalork 3y ago
    That's certainly one way to admit profiting off of America's obesity epidemic. Although I guess everyone already knew Walmart profited off it anyways.
• anigbrowl 3y ago
  It's going to be very interesting to see how the people who insisted on getting off-label prescriptions fare in court.
  • lawlessone 3y ago
    All the non-diabetics using it will generate great data.. for the rest of us.
    • ethanbond 3y ago
      Unfortunately not really, because the infrastructure that allows us to glean insights from actual healthcare practices is abysmal/nonexistent, at least in the US. It became clear during COVID that a lot of people seem to presume there's some way for researchers to just "look at what's happening," and there isn't.
      • nradov 3y ago
        There's no nationwide research infrastructure for gleaning insights like that. But large provider organizations have huge patient populations and do a lot of research. They have multiple studies underway for Ozempic and similar drugs.
        • seanp2k2 3y ago
          Clinical research trials are a lot more useful as they get a lot more data points from far fewer patients. Not many people want to get blood drawn every week and keep a detailed daily journal about eating and exercise habits.
        • ethanbond 3y ago
          Totally. I didn’t say “it won’t be studied,” I’m saying the data won’t be “great,” as described above.
      • anigbrowl 3y ago
        That's a really good point, and it seems to pervade the scientific establishment. There's an unfortunate tendency to study something, and (assuming a real effect is found & reproduced) say 'well we know about that now' and just move onto something else, instead of building out infrastructure to gather more longitudinal/geographic data. The efforts in the UK to build huge datasets for long-term diagnostics is a welcome exception.
• brennaw1 3y ago
  Can we just let people be fat and happy
  • hightrix 3y ago
    We can! But should we? Being fat is similar to being a drug user. At first, you actually are fat and happy. Over time, being fat will absolutely reduce your happiness from the medical, societal, and physical issues that arise. Similar to how drug users build up a tolerance and instead of using the drug to be happy, they use the drug to feel normal. And just to state a simple fact, I do not condone shaming people with weight control issues.
    • lawlessone 3y ago
      I have thought of this before. But it isn't really the same. Drugs, the really bad ones will probably ruin your life or kill you in the space of two or three years. Being fat unless it's super super severe often won't start impacting your health seriously until your 30's or 40's. on the opposite side anorexia will kill you much faster than obesity
      • ethanbond 3y ago
        So what about smoking? It's good that we discourage smoking, even aside from the secondhand smoke component.
      • asow92 3y ago
        Some drugs will kill you slowly also. Doesn't mean they're good for you.
      • vorpalhex 3y ago
        At 30, you have more than half your life ahead of you. At 40, you are just about the halfway mark. That's just the more serious longterm effects. The reversible short term ones are immediate. I was at a birthday hike for a friend - up a short granite hill for good views, some slow meandering around a lake. Very relaxed stuff. One of her guests couldn't make it up the hill. Full on bawling, had to leave early. This woman could not participate in even a casual hike for a friends party and she clearly wanted to be able to. I was fat but below the obesity level before I started my whole thing and the first "benefit" I noticed was that I could do any physical activity. I might be bad at it, but I could rock climb, and kayak, and play basketball with people. The "Oh, I can't do that" was simply _gone_.
• makk 3y ago
  Well, that was quick.
• renewiltord 3y ago
  Okay, it's 10x the rate. From 45 per 100k person-years to 450 per 100k person-years for the pancreatitis. That seems like it's worth taking the play on if you're fat and can't unfat yourself.
• tptacek 3y ago
  Pancreatitis is already a listed side effect of GLP-1 agonists, right?
  • kstrauser 3y ago
    I'm not an expert, but from https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/32103407/ https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/32103407/: > Seven CVOTs enrolling 56,004 patients with T2DM were identified, with a median follow-up time ranging from 1.3 to 5.4 years. [...] Conclusion: Pooled analysis of CVOTs did not suggest any increased risk of either acute pancreatitis or pancreatic cancer with GLP-1RA treatment in T2DM patients.
• sllewe 3y ago
  Anecdotal experience - Good friend of mine who struggles with weight was taking Ozempic for about two months. He described nausea quite often when I saw him but the results were pretty astounding. He then hit a wall where gastroparesis would happen quite often and I happened to be at his house when one of these bouts got very severe. He went from feeling bad, to hunched over in pain and started projectile vomiting in the span of 30 minutes. He said it was clearly the meal he had eaten several days ago...it was awful. I believe this happened to him several more times - and AFAIK he stopped taking it, and promptly regained some weight back.
  • adrr 3y ago
    His doctor isn't monitoring correctly. They should drop the dose. Standard treatment is start with a really smart dose then you double it each month for 5 months. In reality, if you're losing weight, you should just keep on that dosage.
    • kritiko 3y ago
      May be his pharmacy struggling with supply -- I hear lots of folks are titrating outside of the guidelines because they can't get the appropriate dosage.
      • seanp2k2 3y ago
        I wish more folks would get comfortable crushing tablets and weighing out their own dosage on scales. It’s not that hard to cut tabs in half or crush two and make 3 doses out of those, then put them back into caps. Empty gelatin caps are cheap and easy to work with. Should anyone have to do this? Of course not, but if the choice is between this or projectile vomit every waking hour, it’s not a hard choice IMO. Lastly, I just wanted to take a moment to think about how useless pharmacies have become that they can’t actually do this for you anymore and literally just count out pills, or more realistically push a button on a machine that counts out the correct amount.
        • ewoodrich 3y ago
• Mobius01 3y ago
  Anecdotal sample of one here: since starting the treatment a year ago, I have hardly set foot in a fast food restaurant, and my visits to other food establishments have been reduced by 75% at minimum. Grocery shopping has been more mindful and smaller in size. The impact on my desire or even ability to consume food beyond the base metabolic necessity is real.
  • stavros 3y ago
    Why is that? For me, it was because I'd get severe symptoms after eating fatty foods.
    • jprete 3y ago
      Semaglutide made me feel more like I was full and simultaneously made me feel less like I was hungry. The stomach slowdown helped as well. I had some of the less desirable side effects of that, and those were really unpleasant but also showed me that I had no real idea when I was full or hungry and wasn’t eating for the right reasons. I’m hoping the insight sticks, at least.
      • stavros 3y ago
        I hope so too, good luck!
  • justinclift 3y ago
    Out of curiosity, do you also drink Yakult or similar? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yakult https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yakult
    • joshxyz 3y ago
      may i ask why?
      • justinclift 3y ago
        Sure. Ozempic slows down stomach emptying, so food sits around longer in your stomach before continuing on the rest of the digestive process. That seems like it could allow for some not-real-great bacteria to multiply, in an environment they're happy with. Yakult would potentially head that off / stop those bacteria from doing that.
• hooverd 3y ago
  I've also heard that Ozempic was good for the GDP, so mixed bag.
  • seydor 3y ago
    Denmark gets rich, everyone else gets poor because they don't consume. Well played
    • tonyedgecombe 3y ago
      If we ever found out that it cures peoples appetite for spending then it would be banned immediately.
• Animats 3y ago
  "Another issue he brought up with the study is that the researchers found that people on Ozempic were five times more likely to drink alcohol compared to the other medications." Hm. May have located the problem. This is considered to be the first generation of weight loss drugs that work. There will probably be better ones.
  • benbayard 3y ago
    What's odd is that a common side effect with semaglutide medications is a severe reaction to alcohol. Anecdotally, I vomit any time I have alcohol in beer sized doses. In fact, semaglutide is being investigated as a potential treatment for Alcoholism. (https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2023/08/28/1194526119/ozempic-wegovy-drinking-alcohol-cravings-semaglutide https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2023/08/28/1194526...) So I think "other medications" is doing a lot of heavy lifting here. It depends on what medications they're talking about. I think since incretin mimetics are more "social" medications and taken usually by a younger crowd, it would make sense that more people are drinking than maybe other groups.
  • jprete 3y ago
    That’s a bit too judgy, I think. I don’t drink at all, and still had to stop using semaglutide because the nausea/stomach-slowing was very difficult to tolerate.
  • SOLAR_FIELDS 3y ago
    Well, one possible confounding factor here is that they were comparing it against buproprion-naltrexone. Buproprion is also known as Wellbutrin and is prescribed for, among other things, smoking cessation and ahedonia. Naltrexone is interestingly an opioid antagonist that is known to decrease alcohol desire and is often prescribed off label for that use case. So there may be some other factors at play here in this specific study. Side note I had never even heard of this combination of buproprion-naltrexone being prescribed for weight loss. I am not sure how common it is
• stefantalpalaru 3y ago
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• comfortabledoug 3y ago
  I was on it for 2 months, and felt no serious adverse gastrointestinal effects. A tiny bit of nausea, but no vomiting or stomach pains. I was conscious of things acting differently down there so I made sure to eat smaller meals, and avoided fatty foods. A lot of people keep eating just like before and that's where most problems stem from. Initially my appetite almost completely went away, but then it came back to what felt like normal. There were days where I felt like I was eating too much or binging, but the weight kept coming off at about 2lbs per week. Also, being free from the food noise was incredibly liberating because I'm otherwise always thinking about food. I ended up stopping because I would get incredibly sleepy at about 10pm to the point where staying up was almost impossible. I tried eating more thinking it was a blood sugar issue, but that didn't help. It just didn't work with my schedule. I plan to get back on it, or an alternative like Mounjaro.
• nonameiguess 3y ago
  I don't know to what extent this kind of perspective matters compared to the obviously more common usage of obese people with serious diet control problems, but I come at this more from a physique sport angle. I have no real interest in getting big and don't want to use steroids, so I don't actually compete, but I do lift nearly every day, run nearly every day, and have become extremely lean, probably currently somewhere in the area of 6-7%. My experience of using this myself and of seeing other people use it is from this perspective, people who were never all that fat to begin with and are just looking for it to be easier to be extremely not fat. And in those communities and in my personal experience, this kind of thing virtually never happens. I've been in a calorie deficit since roughly mid May at this point, and have felt no nausea, haven't vomited, have felt nothing, really. I can barely tell I'm taking a drug. The only perceivable effect is I'm not hungry, and this seems to be the common takeaway from bodybuilders and models and what not doing this. My wife has been taking it for over a year and a half now and has had no side effects. But I'm not out there trying to maintain my pizza and ice cream diet while outsourcing portion control to a drug. I'm also not trying to lose 80 pounds in a year. I don't eat out, weigh and measure and plan all of my food, and haven't had a dessert or a drop of alcohol since last Christmas. Likely won't have another until this Christmas. It's just something to keep in mind depending on your specific goals. I feel like, at least until I stopped reading the news, I was getting bombarded almost daily with scare articles like this claiming you'll be miserable, sick, your face will sag and age prematurely, all kinds of ridiculous shit. I can't speak to what it's like to have lifelong problems with food habits and to be over a hundred pounds past the recommended BMI range, or what any means of changing that will do to you. But if you are a reasonably fit person who wants to be absolutely shredded, or someone who has been and can be shredded and has lost weight plenty of times before, but just want it to not be a miserable four months, these drugs are absolute gold. Not just bodybuilders, but dancers, gymnasts, climbers, weight class fighter, anyone with a strong incentive to be very lean most of the time. Maybe we don't matter as much to public health compared to fighting the obesity epidemic, and maybe we're not very common on a place like Hacker News where most readers are probably sedentary and have never been athletes, but we're still a demographic and the GLP-1 revolution has been a godsend for us. They're far safer than anything that existed previously. They just take what you were already doing and put it in easy mode.
• dmix 3y ago
  Is this sort of thing higher the longer you use it? If it’s only for 3-6 months to get the ball rolling and getting you walking and eventually into a gym it’s probably worth the risk. It really shouldn’t be a long term thing should it? I was gaining a lot of weight and simply walking for 30min was exercise (which sounds embarrassing in retrospect as I type it). So I did that daily around the neighborhood. That got easier, all I cared about was doing it daily not the outcomes, then I started going on a bike rides with slow increasing intensity, then got a gym membership, and now 2yrs later I’m in excellent shape, addicted to the feeling after working out, and do ~45min of fitness 5 days a week. I know binge eating seems to be the issue with this one in particular but for me I naturally started to eat better on days I do fitness, I feel like eating things that give me energy. My body demands it. When I had relapses into not doing daily fitness I almost always eat poorly in a negative cycle just sitting on the couch drinking alcohol because I don’t have energy to go out. Not to get preachy (everyone has a solution) but I think too many people do dramatic gym efforts or massively change diet with Keto (or w/e) then burn out quickly instead of starting small and focusing on routine/habit as the goal #1… not obsessing about how much calorie burn you can pack into x minutes before going back to nothing in 2 months. Fitness is a basic lifestyle routine like showering and brushing your teeth, it’s not a huge hard commitment when it’s paced properly and a natural daily thing.
  • jprete 3y ago
    I think people vary greatly in how much they enjoy exercise. I don’t, unfortunately, so it’s very hard for me to keep up any aerobic exercise program. I simply don’t form a habit, I have to push myself every time. I don’t think it has anything to do with whether people do a massive change or not. I think the people that enjoy exercise usually never have to do a massive change because they are already doing it from natural enjoyment.
    • dmix 3y ago
      You’ve never felt a good after a short bit of cardio or lifting heavy weights? Besides my point was that most overweight people would lose weight simply walking around the block every day. That’s not asking people to go for a run when they weigh 250lbs+ which will always suck unless you very slowly work up to being able to run more than a half a block and wear knee supports. The thing about working out daily is that the first 10min always sucks bad after but after you’re done it feels great - for the rest of the morning. Being depressed is harder in that mind state which feeds into more physical activity. Like I said though you have to start small.
• sschueller 3y ago
  From my understanding all that Ozempic does it kill your appetite. It doesn't burn fat or anthing else (except the side effects of course) or does it? Seems to me that there must be a safer way to reduce someones appetite.
  • THENATHE 3y ago
    It can help you process glucose better. Semagultide can help lower A1C in multiple ways, mainly by regulating appetite but also by stimulating the receptors that cause insulin to be produced. By producing more insulin, you feel more satiated and also reap the benefits of moving farther away from prediabetes/diabetes