Anesthesiologists are warning users of popular weight loss drugs like Wegovy and Ozempic about an increased risk of complications during surgery.
In June, reports of patients experiencing serious — sometimes life-threatening — problems while under anesthesia prompted the American Society of Anesthesiologists (ASA) to urge patients to stop taking such medications up to a week before going in for a procedure.
However, some experts do not think a week is long enough.
“This is such a serious sort of potential complication that everybody who takes this drug should know about it,” explained Dr. Ion Hobai, an anesthesiologist at Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston, according to NBC 5 News.
Drugs like Wegovy and Ozempic are allegedly causing patients to aspirate while under anesthesia, meaning patients are reflexively sucking undigested food into their lungs.
One of Hobai’s patients, a 42-year-old man who was taking Wegovy, aspirated food during his surgery despite having fasted for 18 hours. He went into respiratory failure and was placed in intensive care.
Hobai noted that the aspiration of food into the lungs can cause infection and significant lung damage, which can result in death, according to NBC 5.
Wegovy and Ozempic work by imitating GLP-1, a hormone normally released when food is consumed. The drugs slow the passage of food through the digestive system and can curb peoples’ appetites. According to anesthesiologists like Hobai, this can be problematic when someone is about to go under anesthesia and is directed to fast beforehand to avoid aspiration.
GLP-1 weight loss drugs have been viewed as game-changers in treating obesity, one of the most critical public health issues faced by Americans today, as covered by The Dallas Express.
The gravity of the issue has been made all the more serious by the years-long increase in childhood obesity rates, which have prompted health officials to develop new BMI growth charts and treatment guidelines to account for how obese some children are getting.
While Wegovy and Ozempic have shown some promising results, medical professionals have voiced some concerns about people taking the medications to shed a few “vanity” pounds.
“Unfortunately, these are being inappropriately used as a vanity drug,” said Dr. Nisha Patel, an obesity-medicine physician in San Francisco, according to The Wall Street Journal.
“Some people are using them just to drop 5 pounds. The get-skinny-quick messaging on social media, that’s not what they’re meant to be used for,” Patel added.
The drugs were initially developed to treat people with diabetes. However, data from healthcare technology company Komodo Health shows that nearly 6 million prescriptions for the drugs filled between January and May were for non-diabetics, NBC 5 reported.
Moreover, as previously reported by The Dallas Express, a lawsuit was recently filed against pharmaceutical companies Novo Nordisk and Eli Lilly by a Louisiana woman who claims users of their weight loss drugs were not warned about the potential side effect of stomach paralysis.
She and other users of the drugs have stepped forward with gastrointestinal complaints, namely gastroparesis, a disorder in which gastric emptying is delayed to the point that it causes upper abdominal pain and vomiting.
In a recent paper published in the Canadian Journal of Anesthesia, Hobai and two fellow doctors, Philip Jones and Patricia Murphy, advise people to stop taking such medications at least three weeks before going under anesthesia.
“When 90% of it is [out of the system], which is after three weeks, hopefully everything should go back to normal. … If you’re taking this drug and you need an operation, you will need to have some extra precautions,” Jones said, according to NBC 5.
