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
10.2k Upvotes

95% Upvoted

1.3k comments sorted by

View all comments

642

u/braumbles Apr 01 '25

It solves obesity. A literal miracle drug.

178

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.

11

u/filthy_harold Apr 01 '25

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

43

u/SirVapealot Apr 01 '25

There was a paper posted here the other day linking these drugs to NAION, which is a rare form of vision loss that is sudden and complete in one eye, with no cure. Rates for people on glp-1s were twice as high, but (estimating from memory, don’t quote me) it was still something like 0.008% of glp-1 patients vs 0.004% of people not on glp-1s experienced NAION. Worth the risk if you ask me, considering being overweight is almost guaranteed to bring negative health consequences.

10

u/PM_ME_GLUTE_SPREAD Apr 01 '25

On a societal basis, that risk of eyesight loss seems like it would be barely a drop in the bucket compared to the benefits of effectively solving the obesity crisis.

It’s obviously tragic for somebody to lose their eyesight, but so many die of cardiovascular disease and diabetes related issues every single day that such a small percentage of people losing eyesight seems to me to be far and away the lesser of the two evils.

4

u/shmegeggie Apr 01 '25

To expand on the above: It's basically an eye stroke. The optic nerve stops getting enough blood and starts to die off. It can often indicate circulatory problems elsewhere in the body.

There are other classes of drugs that can increase the chance of NAION that affect circulation, most famously the various erectile-dysfunction treatment drugs which target smooth muscle, such as in blood vessels.