“Taiwanese man claims blindness after taking obesity medication”… Apply for first damage relief

Recently, as the use of glucagon-like peptide-1 (GLP-1) type obesity treatment has increased, the first case of an application for relief from side effects of the drug has emerged in Taiwan, claiming that he lost his vision after using the obesity treatment.

According to Taiwanese media such as Yonhap Newspaper and China Times on the 12th, Taiwan's Ministry of Health and Welfare's Food and Drug Administration (TFDA) announced the previous day that it had received its first application for compensation for damage caused by vision problems after using Ozempic, a GLP-1 obesity treatment drug.

Suifeng, a thoracic medicine doctor at Taipei City Union Hospital, explained that the patient was a man in his 50s who visited the hospital in November last year due to chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD) and shortness of breath, and his body mass index (BMI) at the time of admission was 32, which is equivalent to obesity.

Dr. Xu said that the patient had no special side effects while taking Ozempic for 4 months and lost 10kg of weight, but after waking up on the morning of February 27th of this year, the entire area in front of his right eye suddenly appeared black, and his vision in his left eye also dropped to 0.1, so he visited the emergency room.

Dr. Xu added that the man was diagnosed with non-arteritic anterior ischemic optic neuropathy (NAION) and had not been able to recover for six months. Suspected it was a side effect from Ozempic administration and reported it to the Ministry of Food and Drug Safety.

NAION is a disease called ‘eye stroke’ and is the second most common cause of optic nerve blindness after glaucoma. Optic nerve destruction caused by a lack of blood supply to the optic nerve can lead to permanent blindness.

The Ministry of Food and Drug Safety announced that the Drug Damage Relief Fund, a foundation dedicated to providing relief for damage caused by drug side effects, received the case and it was officially registered as an agenda item at the end of April.

The Ministry of Food and Drug Safety requested additional explanation from the hospital regarding the purpose of prescription and dosage adjustment. The final review results have not yet been released, so the causal relationship between the drug and symptoms has not been confirmed.

According to the Ministry of Food and Drug Safety, as of the 5th, a total of 314 reports of suspected adverse reactions to GLP-1 drugs were received. Of these, 12 were eye-related side effects, and one application for relief from damage due to blindness is currently in progress.

GLP-1 drugs were originally developed to treat type 2 diabetes, but have recently become widely used to treat obesity and lose weight. Representative examples include semaglutide (Ozempic, Wegobee) and tirzepatide (Maunjaro, Zebbound).

Previously, on the 9th, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) ordered the addition of a warning regarding the risk of vision loss to GLP-1 obesity and diabetes treatments such as Ozempic, Wigobi, and Maunjaro.

In the United States, patients are filing lawsuits one after another against pharmaceutical companies, claiming that they suffered vision loss after using GLP-1 obesity and diabetes treatments.