HQ Team
August 22, 2024: A new study based on data from the World Health Organization’s records on adverse drug reactions found that people taking semaglutide-based weight loss drugs showed higher suicidal rates than other similar drugs.
The researchers found that there was a 45% greater rate of reports of suicidal thoughts associated with Novo Nordisk’s Ozempic and Wegovy, which have semaglutide as an ingredient. However, there is some debate among the scientific community on the research methods used; and the findings contradict other studies on GLP-1 based diabetes and obesity drugs.
The study
The researchers compared semaglutide with other diabetes and weight loss drugs such as Farxiga, metformin, and orlistat , and found that people who took semaglutide entertained more suicidal thoughts.
It is to be noted that though semaglutide caused suicidal thoughts, the overall rate of those thoughts was only 0.3% of all the adverse reactions reported for the drug. Additionally, semglutide was linked to a lower rate of harmful behaviors such as suicide attempts and self-injury.
Regulatory reactions
Regulatory bodies such as the Food and Drug Administration and the European Medicines Agency have investigated the reports of suicide associated with the GLP-1 class drugs but have so far not found any causal link
Novo Nordisk said in a statement that it stands by the safety and efficacy of its GLP-1drugs and added, “the known risks associated with use of these medicines are reflected in their current FDA- and EMA-approved product labeling.” The company said that it will continue to work with regulators to evaluate the risks.
In a statement, the FDA said that it “routinely evaluates individual adverse event reports and adverse event reports from the published literature for all approved drugs.”
“In general,” the agency said, “the FDA does not comment on third-party research or individual reports but may evaluate them as part of the body of evidence to further our understanding about a particular issue and assist in our mission to protect public health.”
Depression
Another study found that the rates of reported suicidal thoughts went up when the patients were being treated with both semaglutide and antidepressants. When researchers excluded those patients from their analysis, semaglutide was no longer linked to a greater rate of suicidal ideations.
The reasons could be manyfold: Maybe semaglutide combined with antidepressants increases the risk of suicidal thoughts. Or, once people taking both drugs were excluded from the analysis, the sample size was too small for any statistical analyses.
It could also be that people who were prescribed semaglutide were already depressed and entertained suicidal thoughts as diabetes and obesity are often risk factors for depression.
Also sudden weight loss can affect the chemical process in the brain and in turn impact one’s mental health. The opposite can also happen if the expected weight loss does not occur and one can go into depression.
“It has major limitations,” said Stephen Evans, an emeritus professor of pharmacoepidemiology at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, in a comment distributed by the Science Media Centre. Spontaneous reports from patients like those in the WHO database “are very subject to bias, including effects of media reporting,” Evans said.
Another limitation of the analysis is that the WHO’s VigiBase database, with more than 32 million reports, does not include comprehensive information on patients’ demographics, lifestyle factors, and medical history, which are all potential variables that can affect the outcome.
The study is published in JAMA Network Open.
