Study links Ozempic and Vegovi to rare disease that can cause blindness

This article was originally published in English

People taking Wegovy and Ozempic, the best-selling diabetes and weight-loss drugs, may be at increased risk of developing diabetes, according to a new study. blindness in one eyedue to a rare eye disease.

The study, published in the journal JAMA Ophthalmology, included medical records of about 17,000 peoplecarried out over a period of six years.

For example, it was noted that patients with diabetes who were prescribed semaglutide, sold under the names Wegovy and Ozempic, experienced four times more likely You have been diagnosed with non-arteritic anterior ischemic optic neuropathy, NAION, an eye condition that is painless but has no cure.

For their part, in patients with obesity or overweight who were prescribed the drug, the probabilities were multiplied by seven suffering from NAION compared to patients who did not take it.

NOYANA arises as a result decreased blood flow to the optic nervewhich connects the eye to the brain, causing sudden and irreversible blindness in one eye. It is a very rare condition, affecting between two and 10 out of every 100,000 people. However, researchers say these findings should make you think doctors and patients.

Dr. Joseph Rizzo, who is one of the study’s authors and director of the neuro-ophthalmology service at Massachusetts Eye and Ear, where the study was conducted, said in a statement that “the use of these drugs has increased sharply in industrialized countries and has provided very significant benefits in many ways, but future conversations between the patient and his or her physician should include NAION as a potential risk.”

Authors of the study They began their research in the summer of 2023.after Rizzo and colleagues diagnosed NAION in three patients taking weight-loss drugs in just one week.

Given how rare the disease is, it seemed suspicious to them, so they decided to look at patient data retroactively. This allowed them to determine the connection.

Further research is needed to establish the links.

The study has some important limitations. It is based on correlation, which means that the researchers They don’t know if the drug caused the blindness.and includes an unusually large sample of patients with rare eye diseases, which may bias the results.

However, their analysis shows that patients had the highest risk of NAION in the first year. after administration of semaglutidesuggesting the disease may have been caused by the drug. The researchers say their findings “significant but temporary“and who advocate for a more thorough study of the link between semaglutide and vision loss.

“Because diabetes is a known risk factor for NAION, patients with diabetes treated with GLP-1 may have a higher risk of suffering from it“Says Dr. Andrew Lee, clinical representative of the American Academy of Ophthalmology and neuro-ophthalmologist at Houston Methodist Hospital, USA.

“The type of research that was conducted is useful for identify possible links between GLP-1 treatment and NAION, but this is not the type of study that can show that treatment is the cause of NAION,” Lee says.

Although the study is interesting,”further research is needed “to test the hypothesis,” he adds. Other studies show that obesity drugs can reduce the risk of cancer, heart attack and stroke, but they are also linked to rare but serious stomach problems.

According to Rizzo, the new results are especially relevant for people considering taking these drugs if they have “other known optic nerve problems, such as glaucoma, or if there has been significant vision loss from other causes in the past.”

Semaglutide, which belongs to a class of drugs known as glucagon-like peptide 1, GLP-1, receptor agonists, increased in popularity since Danish pharmaceutical company Novo Nordisk launched Ozempic for diabetes in 2017 and launched Wegovy as a weight management drug in 2021.

Demand has grown so much that the European Union is now facing a shortage of Ozempic, prompting the European Medicines Agency (EMA) to urge doctors not to prescribe it solely for the purpose of “ozempic”.cosmetic purposes“and warn against counterfeit drugs.

This article has been updated to include comments from an independent expert.