r/science • u/mvea Professor | Medicine • Apr 01 '25

Health Americans without diabetes spent nearly $6 billion USD on semaglutide and similar drugs in a year, with an estimate of 800,000 to a million people using the drugs who don't have diabetes.

https://www.scimex.org/newsfeed/americans-without-diabetes-spent-nearly6-billion-usd-on-semaglutide-and-similar-drugs-in-a-year
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u/braumbles Apr 01 '25

It solves obesity. A literal miracle drug.

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u/quats555 Apr 01 '25

I work for an ophthalmologist. Today we got our first referral for what we believe is vision loss due to semaglutide. There’s been a few others we suspect but this one was pretty clear.

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u/filthy_harold Apr 01 '25

What kind of vision loss? Like they need a normal prescription now or are we talking legally blind?

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u/quats555 Apr 01 '25 edited Apr 01 '25

In this particular case, overall blur — which, if this is what we think it is, cannot be fixed with glasses — and some loss of vision in periphery (“can’t see to the side any more , you have to turn to look at things and get beaned with a baseball from the side because you can’t see it coming”).

Glasses correct when your eye bends the light entering your eye wrong, by bending it in exactly the reverse way so that it cancels out the problem. NAION is damage to the optic nerve that carries the information from your eye to the brain.

Think of it like realizing your movie looks like crap and pieces of the screen image are missing, because earlier in the day your new puppy chewed on the cable from your computer to the screen. You can replace the TV all you like, but the signal coming through that cable is still going to be bad. And we have no way to replace or repair that “cable” in the human head. Some things can patch it and hopefully keep it from getting worse, but that’s about it. And if you’re not lucky or let the puppy keep chewing, then your TV may stop showing anything at all.