December 14, 2023 – Injectable medications for diabetes and weight reduction have led to a pointy increase in calls to poison control centers across the country. CNN Reports.
Some people were hospitalized with nausea, vomiting and stomach pain. They are typically treated with intravenous fluids and anti-nausea medications.
According to CNN, American poison control centers received nearly 3,000 calls about semaglutide from January to November. That's a rise of greater than 15-fold since 2019. In just about all cases, 94%, only the drug was involved.
The FDA approved semaglutide in 2017 and is sold as Ozempic for diabetes and Wegovy for weight reduction. It could cause stomach and intestinal problems. The drug has been briefly supply since last 12 months and a few pharmacies are making compounded versions that always differ from the patented drug, CNN said.
Most of the calls involved self-dosing errors, Association of Poison Control Centers Kait Brown told CNN.
“Often it's a person who may have accidentally taken a double dose or the wrong dose,” Brown said.
Brand-name medications can be found in prefilled pens that the patient sets the right dose and clicks to inject. But the compounded versions normally are available multi-dose glass vials, with patients drawing up the doses into syringes. This way it is less complicated to make mistakes.
A call to a poison control center got here from a girl who unintentionally took 1 milliliter as a substitute of 0.1 milliliter as her first dose for weight reduction. That's greater than ten times the beneficial dose.
“We were getting reports of people taking doses that we had never heard of before,” said Joseph Lambson, director of the New Mexico Poison and Drug Information Center.