Health officials are warning some patients have made themselves sick after messing up dosing for a version of popular weight loss drugs.
A consumer crowdsourced tracker shows individuals are struggling to find supply of the injectable diabetes drugs Ozempic and Mounjaro, as well as the obesity medications Wegovy and Zepbound.
The FDA currently shows a shortage of single-dose amounts of Wegovy, an injectable obesity drug with the active ingredient semaglutide.
Some patients have turned to doctors, med spas, and telehealth providers using special compounding pharmacies which make their own versions of the drugs.
The FDA warns patients have overdosed, in some cases needing to go to the hospital. America’s Poison Centers also warns it continues to see growing numbers of people who are sick from accidentally overdosing on the popular drugs that can cause weight loss.
Kaitlyn Brown, the Clinical Managing Director of America’s Poison Centers, tells Scripps News they’ve seen about a 69% increase from the first half of 2024 compared to first half of 2023.
"From January to June of 2024, so far, we've had 3,866 exposures to GLP-1 drugs. That's compared to January to June of 2023, where we had 2,284 exposures to GLP-1 drugs reported,” she said.
America's Poison Centers website shows as of July 31, they’ve managed 4,676 GLP-1 agonist related exposure cases.
There’s a few reasons for the increase. For one, more people are using the drugs to begin with.
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Novo Nordisk, which makes Ozempic and Wegovy, told Scripps News in an email “We have served over one million U.S. patients with Wegovy® and total weekly prescriptions have more than doubled since January 2024."
The other culprit is dosing errors.
"These medications aren't taken daily, so it is common that people could take their doses too closely together," Brown said. "You know, if they're not tracking them and writing it down or writing down that they already took their dose for that week."
There is also the issue of compounded versions of the drugs. Among the most popular is compounded semaglutide.
Compounded drugs are legal. They're made by compounding pharmacies when a drug is otherwise hard to come by, such as when the patient is allergic to an ingredient or there's a shortage of the medicine.
But those compounded meds come with warnings. In January, the FDA issued an alert, saying “patients and health care professionals should understand that the agency does not review compounded versions of these drugs for safety, effectiveness, or quality.”
Dosing compounded semaglutide can be more confusing, with patients having to do math and decipher different units like milligrams and milliliters.
Brown says as of June 30, 2024, there have been 159 such exposures reported to poison centers. In all of 2023, the number was 32.
“That's almost five times the amount of cases. And just half the time this year.”
Steven Dudley, a clinical toxicologist and director of the Arizona Poison and Drug Information Center, explains the issue.
"Instead of getting a pre-marked syringe so you know exactly how much to take. You're getting a regular vial and a blank syringe and you're being told, 'hey, take this much.' And there's a lot of confusion that we're seeing from patients in terms of how much that dose should be," he said.
The FDA recently issued an alert after patients were injecting themselves with "five to twenty times more than the intended dose of semaglutide."
It happened from “errors in preparing their own compounded semaglutide injections from multiple-dose vials they'd been prescribed.” Some sought medical care or were hospitalized. The symptoms reported included nausea, vomiting, abdominal pain, fainting, headache, migraine, dehydration, acute pancreatitis and gallstones.
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The FDA says providers need to be very vigilant with prescribing compounded semaglutide, and contact the compounding pharmacy if they have questions. Patients should do the same.
Brown reiterated the need to go to a reputable compounding pharmacy.
“You really have to make sure you're going through a licensed compounding pharmacy that's employing really safe practices for compounding these medications," she said. "Because there is that difference and that nuance that these products don't go through FDA regulation.”
