Overdoses involving Ozempic and other weight loss shots have surged 15-fold over the past five years, figures show.
America’s Poison Centers says they handled nearly 3,000 calls related to the medications between January and November this year — compared to just 196 in 2019.
Among the cases was a man in New Mexico who took ten times the recommended amount as a first dose.
Most of the calls were linked to compounded, or pharmacy-made, versions of the drug, officials said, rather than the manufactured product.
The above graph shows how the number of calls to America’s poison centers over Ozempic has skyrocketed. In most cases, individuals had suffered an overdose of the drug
It was not clear how many patients who called the centers were hospitalized or died because of their issue.
People who overdose on the drug can suffer from severe nausea, diarrhea, abdominal pain and constipation.
In severe cases, patients may also suffer from seizures or stomach paralysis.
Most of the patients calling after overdosing on the drug were in their 60s, the poison centers said — although patients ranged from 40 to 70 years old.
In 94 percent of cases the poison centers recorded, semaglutide was the only drug reported on the call.
Officials blamed the issue on compounded, or pharmacy-made, versions of the drug which they said often made it easier for people to overdose
Among patients who overdosed was a 50-year-old man in New Mexico who gave himself 50 units instead of five as his first dose of the weight loss drug. He was left vomiting for two days and struggling with nausea for a week.
In a second, reported in Missouri, a patient accidentally set the pen all the way up and gave themselves an entire month of doses at once.
Dr Kait Brown, the clinical managing director of the poison centers, told CNN: ‘Oftentimes, it’s a person who accidentally took a double dose or took the wrong dose.’
It is difficult to overdose using the official Ozempic pens, made by Danish company Novo Nordisk, because users must set the pen to a dose and then click to inject themselves.
This helps to avoid any accidental overdoses, although patients can still set the pens too high.
But compounded versions made by pharmacies are often distributed in glass vials — with patients then asked to fill syringes themselves.
This makes it ‘easy’ to overdose, said Dr Joseph Lambson, the director of the New Mexico Poison and Drug Information Center.
‘This is where we see a lot of errors,’ he said. ‘They end up drawing too much.’
‘I think that whenever we have to rely on a patient to discern what the right dose is, to draw up and then administer, you’re putting more chances in there for there to be errors.’
A spokesperson for Novo Nordisk said: ‘We are taking multiple steps to ensure responsible use of our semaglutide medicines which are detailed on semaglutide.com.’
Ozempic first became available in 2017 as a drug to help patients manage their diabetes by suppressing appetite.
Wegovy, which uses the same drug but in a slightly higher dose, was given the green light in 2021 for managing weight loss.
Popularized by celebrities such as Chelsea Handler and Elon Musk, demand for the medication then took off — faster than its manufacturer could keep up with.
Data showed there were 230,000 prescriptions for Ozempic, Wegovy and other weight loss drugs like Mounjaro and Rybelsus in 2019.
But by the year 2022 this had taken off to more than five million, according to data from Komodo Health.
The shortages allowed pharmacies to start making their own versions of the drug, called compounding, to distribute to patients.
But this has triggered alerts from the FDA, warning that they are seeing unapproved doses of the drug and semaglutide salts — which have not been approved for use in the drug.
America’s Poison Centers runs 55 centers across the country staffed by doctors who assist those who have been poisoned.
Cases normally involve children who have swallowed cosmetic products, sedatives or objects like small plastic toys.
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