The Ozempic and Wegovy mistake sending thousands to poison control
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- Researchers at UT San Antonio found poison control calls about semaglutide (Ozempic, Wegovy) climbed from 1,000–1,500 per year before 2021 to more than 8,000 by 2023, following the FDA's 2021 approval of the drug for chronic weight management.
- Jordan Miller, then an undergraduate at UT San Antonio, led the analysis with statistics professor David Han, Pharm.D specialist Robert S. Miller, and Dr. Shawn M. Varney, medical director of the South Texas Poison Center.
- The study, published in the Journal of Medical Toxicology, found most cases were accidental therapeutic mistakes—not intentional misuse—with the two most common errors being daily instead of weekly injections and starting at the highest dose rather than titrating up gradually.
- Semaglutide was originally approved as a type 2 diabetes treatment, and its expansion to weight management vastly enlarged the user population and reshaped the call profile, with semaglutide dominating GLP-1RA exposure reports far above other drugs in the class.
- The research was featured as the cover story of Significance, the flagship magazine of the Royal Statistical Society and the American Statistical Association, and earned first place at UT San Antonio's Los Datos conference.
- Miller and Han recommended stronger patient education at every step—from the prescriber's office to the pharmacy counter—arguing the drug's long-term safety profile remains incompletely understood for the weight-loss population.
Why it matters: Poison control calls tied to semaglutide jumped more than fivefold—from roughly 1,500 per year to over 8,000 by 2023—after the FDA greenlit the drug for weight loss, and the researchers say most incidents trace to confused patients taking weekly doses daily or skipping the titration schedule. The implication for prescribers and pharmacists is a clear, actionable fix: tighter counseling at the point of dispensing could eliminate a large share of these avoidable adverse events in a drug now used by millions beyond its original diabetic population.
