Three hours after Becky Cheairs injected herself with the primary dose of compounded semaglutide, she began to vomit. Crouched over the bathroom, reeling from nausea, she thought there was no means she would make it on the R.V. journey from Arkansas to San Antonio she had deliberate that weekend.
She was proper: She spent the following day throwing up not less than as soon as an hour.
Like many others, Ms. Cheairs, 66, had taken the drug to shed extra pounds. However she hadn’t taken the brand-name merchandise Ozempic or Wegovy, which are available pens pre-filled with a selected dose. As an alternative, the treatment she was prescribed by way of a telehealth service got here with a vial and a bag of syringes to attract the drug out herself.
Ms. Cheairs’ husband requested how a lot she had taken, then learn the directions. He was shocked: Ms. Cheairs had by accident given herself 5 instances the quantity she was presupposed to take.
Accidents like this have gotten extra frequent. There have been 159 calls to nationwide poison management facilities to date this yr involving compounded GLP-1s, the category of medicines that features semaglutide. In 2023, there have been solely 32.
The overwhelming majority of those calls are from individuals who took an excessive amount of treatment, stated Kait Brown, the scientific managing director at America’s Poison Facilities. The issue has change into so regarding that the Meals and Drug Administration issued a warning last month about people overdosing on compounded semaglutide. Some sufferers have been hospitalized, developed pancreatitis or gallstones, or have fainted or change into dehydrated. Some sufferers had taken 10 and even 20 instances greater than the supposed dose.
The demand for Ozempic and comparable medicine has pushed compounded drugs, as soon as a considerably area of interest nook of well being care, into the mainstream. There isn’t strong knowledge on how many individuals take compounded GLP-1s. However some estimates have recommended thousands and thousands of People could also be looking for them out, typically, as a result of they’re on the lookout for a less expensive possibility or cannot discover the brand-name drug in inventory.
