Drugs like Wegovy and Ozempic can slow digestion so much that it puts patients at increased risk for pulmonary aspiration when they're under anesthesia.
Once 540 pounds, Jeff Brinker is now half that weight and feeling better than he's felt in decades. Here's how he did it.for weight loss may face life-threatening complications if they need surgery or other procedures that require empty stomachs for anesthesia. This summer's guidance to halt the medication for up to a week may not go far enough, either.
"This is such a serious sort of potential complication that everybody who takes this drug should know about it," said Hobai, who was among the first to flag the issue.Nearly 6 million prescriptions for the class of drugs that include Wegovy and Ozempic were written between January and May in the U.S. for people who don't have diabetes, according to Komodo Health, a health care technology company.
"When 90% of it is gone, which is after three weeks, hopefully everything should go back to normal," Jones said. Hobai is completing a retrospective study of almost 200 patients taking semaglutide. While it'll be published later this year, the work so far appears to confirm a small study from Brazil, he said. In that study, about a quarter of patients taking semaglutide had residual food in their stomachs during procedures requiring sedation — even after stopping the drug for 10 days.
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