Johnna Mendenall started taking Wegovy injections to lose weight after struggling with weight control due to motherhood and a sedentary desk job. However, she experienced severe side effects such as vomiting, fatigue, and severe constipation. While gastrointestinal symptoms are the most common side effects, other side effects like hair loss, anxiety, depression, and fatigue have also been reported. Semaglutide users have reported non-gastrointestinal side effects like mood swings and sunken facial features. Wegovy and Saxenda are the only GLP-1 agonist injections licensed for weight loss, but Eli Lilly’s Tirzepatide, a type 2 diabetes drug, may soon gain approval for weight loss with fewer side effects. Gradually increasing doses can avoid side effects, but insurance companies often require a faster schedule. Mendenall’s insurance paid for her injections, but without coverage, it would cost her $1,200 a month. Personal stories online about semaglutide range from overwhelmingly positive to harsh scenarios with potential long-term health consequences.
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June 12, 2023: Johnna Mendenall had never been “the skinny friend,” she said, but the demands of motherhood, coupled with a sedentary desk job, made weight control even more difficult. Worried that her family’s type 2 diabetes would catch up with her, she decided to start taking Wegovy injections to lose weight.
I was nervous about the possible side effects. It took her 5 days of looking at the Wegovy pen before she worked up the courage for her first .25 milligram injection. And sure enough, the side effects became strong.
“I got nauseated,” he said. “When I increased my dose to 1 milligram, I spent the whole night, from 10 p.m. to 5 a.m., throwing up. I almost quit that day.”
Mendenall is among a growing number of people sharing personal stories online about the weight loss drug Wegovy, and drugs like it, delving into their sometimes unpleasant and potentially heartbreaking side effects.
While gastrointestinal (GI) symptoms seem to be the most common, a long list of others have been discussed in the news, on TikTok, and in online forums. These include the “Ozempic face,” or the gaunt look some get after taking the drug, along with debilitating hair loss, anxiety, depression, and fatigue.
The main side effects of Mendenall have been vomiting, fatigue, and severe constipation, but it has also seen some positive changes: The “food noise,” or the urge to eat when you’re not hungry, has disappeared. Since the first dose of her 12 weeks ago, she has gone from 236 pounds to 215.
caution label
Wegovy’s active ingredient, semaglutide, mimics the role of a natural hormone called glucagon-like peptide, or GLP-1, which helps you feel well fed. Semaglutide is used at a lower dose under the brand name Ozempic, which is approved for type 2 diabetes and used off-label for weight loss.
Both Ozempic and Wegovy come with a caution label For potential side effects, the most common are nausea, diarrhea, stomach pain, and vomiting.
With the growing popularity of semaglutide, more people are getting prescriptions through telemedicine companies,
more in-depth consultations, leading to more side effects, said Caroline Apovian, MD, professor of medicine at Harvard Medical School and co-director of the Center for Weight Management and Wellness at Brigham and Women’s Hospital.
Specialists say starting with a low dose and gradually increasing it over time helps avoid side effects, but insurance companies often require a faster schedule to continue to cover the drug, Apovian said.
“Insurance companies are practicing medicine for us by requiring the patient to up the dose [too quickly],” She explained.
Mendenall’s insurance paid for his Wegovy injections, but without that coverage, he said it would cost him $1,200 a month.
There are similar medicines on the market, such as liraglutide, which is sold under the name Saxenda. But it’s a daily injection, rather than weekly, and it also has side effects and has been shown to be less effective. In a clinical trialpeople studied saw their average body weight decrease over 68 weeks by 15.8% with semaglutide and 6.4% with liraglutide.
Tirzepatide, brand name Mounjaro, a type 2 diabetes drug made by Eli Lilly that could soon gain FDA approval for weight loss, may have fewer side effects. In clinical trials, 44% of those who took semaglutide had nausea and 31% reported diarrhea, compared with 33% and 23% of those taking tirzepatidealthough no trials have directly compared the two agents.
loss of bowel control
For now, Wegovy and Saxenda are the only GLP-1 agonist injections licensed for weight loss, and their maker, Danish pharmaceutical company Novo Nordisk, is facing its second shortage of Wegovy amid rising demand.
Personal stories online about semaglutide range from overwhelmingly positive, just what some need to win a lifelong battle against obesity, to harsh scenarios with potential long-term health consequences, and everything in between.
One private community on reddit is dedicated to one particularly nasty side effect: loss of bowel control While he sleeps. Others have reported uncontrollable vomiting.
Kimberly Carew of Clearwater, FL, started on .5 milligrams of Ozempic last year after her rheumatologist and endocrinologist suggested it to treat her type 2 diabetes. She was told it came with the weight loss bonus, that she hoped the It will help with your back and joint pain.
But after he increased the dose to 1 milligram, his gastrointestinal symptoms, which started out mild, became unbearable. He couldn’t keep food down, and when she vomited, the food often came out whole, she said.
“One night I ate ramen before going to bed. And the next morning, she came out just as she went under,” said Carew, 42, a registered intern in mental health counseling. “She was having severe heartburn and couldn’t take a couple bites of food without gagging.”
He also had “sulfur burps”, a side effect discussed by some Ozempic users, which sometimes gave him a rotten egg taste.
she was diagnosed with gastroparesis, the weakening and paralysis of the contractions of the stomach muscles that make it difficult to digest food. Some types of gastroparesis can be resolved by stopping GLP-1 drugs, as mentioned in two case reports. in it Journal of Investigative Medicine.
gut hormone
Gastrointestinal symptoms are more common with semaglutide because the hormone it mimics, GLP-1, is secreted by cells in the stomach, small intestine and pancreas, he said. Anne Peters, MD, director of the USC Diabetes Clinical Programs.
“Here’s the deal: The side effects are real because it’s a gut hormone. It is increasing the level of something that your body already has,” she said.
But, like Apovian, Peters said those side effects can likely be avoided if injections are started at the lowest doses and titrated gradually.
While the average starting dose is 0.25 milligrams, Peters said he often starts his patients with about one-eighth of that, just “one puff of a dose.”
“It will take them months to get to the starting dose, but what’s the rush?”
Peters said he also avoids giving diabetes patients the maximum dose, which is 2 milligrams per week of Ozempic (and 2.4 milligrams of Wegovy for weight loss).
When asked about the side effects of the drugs, Novo Nordisk responded that “GLP-1 receptor agonists are a well-established class of drugs that have demonstrated long-term safety in clinical trials. The most common adverse reactions, as with all GLP-1 [agonists]They are related to the gastrointestinal system.
Is it the drug or the weight loss?
Still, semaglutide users on the Internet report non-gastrointestinal side effects such as hair loss, mood swings, and sunken facial features. While these cases are often what is known in the medical world as “anecdotals”, which are personal clinical experiences, but not always easy to verify, they can be very sincere.
Celina Horvath Myers, also known as CelinaSpookyBoo, a canadian youtuber who took Ozempic for type 2 diabetes, said she began having intense panic attacks and depression after starting the drug.
“Who I’ve been these past two weeks has probably been the scariest time of my life,” he said on his YouTube channel.
While severe depression and anxiety are not established side effects of the drug, some people develop anhedonia, or the “reduced capacity for pleasure,” said W. Scott Butsch, MD, MSc, director of obesity medicine at the Institute Cleveland Bariatric and Metabolic. Clinic. But that could be a natural consequence of a decreased appetite, he said, since food gives most people pleasure at the moment.
Many other reported changes come from the weight loss itself, not the medication, Butsch said.
“These are drugs that change the body’s weight regulation system,” he said. “When someone loses weight, you get the reduction of fat cells, as well as atrophy of muscles. This rapid weight loss can change the appearance of the face.”
For some people, like Mendenall, the side effects are worth it. For others, like Carew, they are intolerable.
Carew said she stopped taking the medication after about 7 months and gradually recovered to eating solid food again.
“It’s the American way, we all have to be slim and beautiful,” she said. “But I feel like it’s very unsafe because we just don’t know how seriously our bodies will react to these things in the long term. People see it as a quick fix, but it comes with risks.”
https://www.webmd.com/obesity/news/20230612/popular-weight-loss-drugs-can-carry-some-gnarly-side-effects?src=RSS_PUBLIC
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