Alexia Boyer, Agence Science Presse
Initially brought on the market to combat type 2 diabetes, for the last four years Ozempic has been widely used as a weight loss drug. Experts are now starting to see the negative effects of this unintended long-term usage.
Semaglutide, commercialized under the names Ozempic and Wegovy, is a medication intended to treat type 2 diabetes. Also termed non insulin-dependent diabetes, it represents the most common form of the disease.
Even though Canada has not authorized the drug’s use for the treatment of obesity, 61,000 people were prescribed Ozempic for weight loss in 2023 alone. And they are not reimbursed by their health insurance for this, according to a Canadian Press article. Patients have to finance their prescriptions out of pocket. And a La Presse inquiry showed how easy it is to obtain Ozempic over the Internet.
Many celebrities, from Oprah Winfrey to Elon Musk to the Quebec star Nathalie Simard, as well as numerous users on social media, have won this drug popularity by singing its praises. Searches for “Ozempic before and after results” have yielded millions of results, including videos of people injecting the product.
The problem resides in the fact that many people don’t take the drug for more than a year. Those patients were the focus of a study in the science magazine Nature.
Regaining Weight
Two clinical trials cited in this report showed that when patients stopped taking semaglutide, they put back on the pounds. In one of the two trials, published in the Journal of the American Medical Association, 800 participants injected the drug over a four-month period, as well as reducing the calories they consumed, doing exercise and receiving advice. They lost an average of 10.6% of their initial weight. A third of participants then received a placebo. Eleven months later, they had gained back 7% of their weight, whereas the participants who had kept taking semaglutide continued to slim down.
The other clinical trial, published in the journal Diabetes, Obesity and Metabolism, showed that participants gained back two-thirds of the weight they had lost in the year after stopping semaglutide injections. Before stopping, they had lost an average of 17.3% of their initial weight after a year of treatment and lifestyle changes.
Risks of Stopping
In addition to weight gain, participants regained abdominal fat and developed associated comorbidities. In effect, many illnesses are related to excess fat along the waist area, notably cardiac diseases and resistance to insulin. When they stopped taking semaglutide, these risks returned to the same levels as before the clinical trial. These patients also showed high blood pressure, and high blood sugar and cholesterol levels.
Numerous factors played in to their stopping their treatment, one of which was an absence of reimbursements. The highest dose of Ozempic costs $400 in Canadian dollars a month. Others stopped because of side effects, including gastro-intestinal problems. There was also the worldwide shortage of Ozempic at play, as well as a stabilization of weight, which made patients think the drug was no longer working.
Leave a Reply