One specific circumstance worth considering is if you are preparing for surgery, as anesthesiologists are raising concerns about these medications. They caution users against taking the drug before anesthesia due to the increased risk of vomiting during the procedure, as the medications cause digestion slow-down, leading to excess food in the stomach.
From UPI:
"We've had reports of people vomiting immediately preoperatively when there shouldn't be any food in their stomach," Champeau said.
"As soon as we started hearing anecdotal reports and case reports, the mind immediately goes to how the drug works and what it does."
The ASA is recommending that people on a GLP-1 agonist like Ozempic stop taking it prior to surgery.
If you take such a drug once a day, you should not take your daily dose the morning of surgery, Champeau said.
If you take the drug once a week, you should hold off on your dose until after surgery.
"If you take it every Sunday and you're having surgery on a Wednesday, you can't take it the Sunday before the surgery," Champeau said. "You've got to stop it at least a week in advance, if you're taking the once-a-week dose."
There's a reason patients are told to not eat the night before surgery, and it's the same reason they need to hold off on Ozempic.
"When anesthesia was first discovered back in the 1840s, nobody knew about this and it happened a lot. You'd be putting someone to sleep with ether and they would vomit and they would suck it in their lungs and they would have a terrible, terrible pneumonia or die," Champeau said.
This prospect can indeed be quite alarming, particularly for individuals who have been using Ozempic for an extended period and may require emergency surgery.
It is undeniable that the risks associated with anesthesia under such circumstances would be significantly heightened.
