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What GLP-1 Users Should Know About the Potential Risk of a Rare Type of Vision Loss
Dozens of Americans have filed personal injury lawsuits against the makers of popular GLP-1 drugs, like Ozempic, Wegovy and Mounjaro, claiming they were not properly warned of the risk of a rare type of sudden vision loss, called nonarteritic anterior ischemic optic neuropathy, or NAION, when taking the medications.
Researchers have been studying a possible link between GLP-1 drugs and this eye condition in recent years after a possible safety signal was reported from a single health center in Boston in 2024, but so far, no study has proven these drugs are the cause.
Novo Nordisk, the maker of Ozempic and Wegovy, said they take “all reports of adverse events very seriously,” and pushed back against these claims, stating, “Novo believes the personal injury lawsuits filed in the U.S. are without merit and are vigorously defending them,” a spokesperson told ABC News.
Common Drugs, Sweeteners and Pesticides Can Act as Antibiotics on Gut Bacteria
For more than a century, the term antibiotic has carried a narrow meaning: a drug designed to kill bacteria, deployed by clinicians to treat infection. A new review argues that this definition has become untenable. Writing in Nature Reviews Gastroenterology & Hepatology, Jacobo de la Cuesta-Zuluaga, Kiran R. Patil and Lisa Maier synthesize a decade of evidence showing that a startlingly broad range of compounds never intended as antimicrobial agents, including common prescription medicines, dietary substances, food additives, artificial sweeteners, pesticides and industrial chemicals, exhibit genuine antibacterial activity.
The authors refer to these as non-antibiotic antimicrobials, and their accumulating impact on the human gut microbiome is, they contend, one of the most underappreciated forces shaping human health.
The empirical foundation for this view was laid by large-scale laboratory screens, most notably a 2018 study in which the team around Lisa Maier and Kiran Patil tested roughly 1,000 marketed drugs against representative strains of human gut bacteria and found that about a quarter inhibited at least one commensal microbe.
GLP-1 Prescriptions for People With No Medical Need Are Climbing
A large new study confirms what many people have long suspected: A sizable number of people taking drugs like Ozempic have no medical reason to do so. The study, an analysis of the medical records of more than 92 million U.S. adults, identified more than 1.1 million who were taking GLP-1 medications, without any record of an issue that would make them eligible, like obesity or diabetes.
While the researchers didn’t examine why people took these medications, doctors said many people are probably using them simply to shed some pounds or in the hope they might deliver other, buzzy potential benefits. “
You see it all over the place. You have people describing publicly their experience with these medications, some good, some bad,” Dr. Babak Orandi, an obesity medicine specialist and transplant surgeon at N.Y.U. Langone Health, and the lead author of the study, published Tuesday in the journal Obesity. The positive anecdotes, he said, “may open up people’s curiosity to say, ‘Hey, maybe that could work for me.’”
FDA Updates Drug Safety Testing Rules to Embrace Non-Animal Methods
European Pharmaceutical Review reported:
The US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) is seeking public comment on its newly published direct final rule, that clarifies its terminology around use of non-animal methods where appropriate for testing drug safety prior to studies in humans. The rule replaces terms such as ‘animal tests’ and ‘animal studies’ with the terms “nonclinical tests” and ‘nonclinical studies.’ The update also replaces related terms, including ‘preclinical’ and ‘in vitro’.
Overall, the FDA’s rule no longer includes language that could indicate animal testing is the only acceptable method for producing safety information for regulatory decisions in products used in humans. The agency clarified however, that the rule does not eliminate or prohibit animal studies, change standards or add financial or regulatory requirements on drug developers.
The agency’s direct final rule defines ‘nonclinical test’ and ‘nonclinical study’ in line with the Food and Drug Omnibus Reform Act of 2022 (FDORA). This recognises newer, non-animal methods and traditional animal studies as options for providing the evidence required for first-in-human clinical studies.
