Ozempic Users Face Double Risk of Rare Vision Loss, Nordic Studies Find
Despite the findings, researchers cautioned against the immediate cessation of Ozempic treatment.
10/25/2024
Danish researchers are raising concerns about the widely prescribed diabetes drug Ozempic after discovering that it significantly increases patients’ risk of experiencing what doctors describe as a “stroke of the optic nerve.”
Ozempic Found to Double the Risk
The study findings, published in the International Journal of Retina and Vitreous, suggest that the use of Ozempic (semaglutide) more than doubles the risk of developing non-arteritic anterior ischemic optic neuropathy (NAION), a serious eye condition characterized by sudden vision loss in one eye, because of inadequate blood flow to the optic nerve. NAION is considered the most common cause of sudden vision loss in people older than 50.
“You can reasonably consider it as a stroke of the optic nerve,” Dr. Joseph Rizzo III, professor of ophthalmology and director of the neuro-ophthalmology service at Harvard Medical School’s Massachusetts Eye and Ear, told The Epoch Times. “And, like a stroke, you lose function.”
Sudden Vision Loss: Usually occurs upon waking up in the morning or after a nap.
Painless Vision Loss: Unlike other eye conditions, NAION is typically painless.
Vision Loss in One Eye: Typically affects only one eye, although it can sometimes affect both eyes.
Blurred Vision: Vision may be blurry or distorted, especially in the lower half of the visual field.
Loss of Color Vision: Some people may experience a loss of color perception or see colors differently.
Shadow in the Visual Field: Some patients may see a dark shadow or blind spot in their field of vision.
Researchers examined data from 424,152 Danish patients diagnosed with Type 2 diabetes to investigate the link between Ozempic and increased NAION risk. The findings indicated that Ozempic significantly heightens the risk of developing the debilitating condition.
“We found that Ozempic more than doubles the risk of developing NAION,” Jakob Grauslund, professor of ophthalmology at the University of Southern Denmark’s Department of Clinical Research, said in a statement. “It is a condition that can lead to severe and permanent loss of vision.”
Rise in NAION Cases Since Ozempic Introduction
There has been a marked increase in NAION cases since Ozempic was introduced in Denmark in 2018, according to Grauslund.
“Whereas we used to see between 60 and 70 cases of NAION per year, we are now seeing up to 150,” he said, pointing out that the majority of hospital admissions for NAION are now among patients with Type 2 diabetes.
Similarly, in a related preprint study not yet peer-reviewed, Anton Pottegard, professor of pharmaceuticals at the Department of Public Health at the University of Southern Denmark (SDU), and his team examined new Ozempic users among Type 2 diabetes patients in Denmark and Norway. Consistent with Grauslund’s findings, Pottegard’s team reported that the risk of developing NAION doubles with Ozempic use.
While the current studies revealed a lower number of cases compared with a previous U.S. study—which found that the risk more than doubled—both Danish studies corroborate a similar risk for diabetes patients using Ozempic.
In an emailed statement, Pottegard told The Epoch Times that these studies will likely trigger “quite a few” new regulatory and research actions.
“The regulators have now initiated a process of evaluating the studies to decide whether NAION should be acknowledged formally as a side effect to Ozempic,” he wrote. “We do not (yet) know whether this is a class effect, i.e. also affects use of tirzepatide and the other new drugs incoming, or [is] specific to semaglutide.”
According to Pottegard, the findings from the new study will “no doubt be the subject of new research,” and in the event that the regulators acknowledge the risk, they could establish monitoring programs for the other drugs in this class.
“And then there’s certainly a need for research into not only why this happens (we have no idea about the mechanism) but also what patients are at risk of experiencing it,” he wrote.
Findings Don’t Mean Stopping Ozempic Use
Despite these findings, the Danish researchers cautioned against the immediate cessation of Ozempic treatment.
“This is a serious but very rare side effect. Often, we only learn about this kind of thing after a new drug has been on the market for a few years,” Pottegard clarified in the statement. “It should be emphasised that it is neither more serious nor more common than the rare side effects of many other medicines that we continue to use.”
Additionally, Kurt Hojlund, diabetes professor at SDU’s Steno Diabetes Center Odense, stressed in the statement the importance of treating Type 2 diabetes while taking into account the associated risks of Ozempic.
“It is extremely important that Type 2 diabetes is treated, but you have to consider whether the small increased risk of severe vision loss by using Ozempic means that you should instead use one of the other new drugs that protect against kidney and cardiovascular disease,” he said.
Novo Nordisk Responds
In a statement emailed to The Epoch Times, Novo Nordisk said NAION is a very rare eye disease but that it is not an adverse drug reaction for the marketed formulations of semaglutide (Ozempic, Rybelsus, and Wegovy) per the approved labels.
“After a thorough evaluation of the studies from SDU and Novo Nordisk’s internal safety assessment, Novo Nordisk is of the opinion that the benefit-risk profile of semaglutide remains unchanged,” a spokesperson for the company wrote.
The Novo Nordisk spokesperson stated that while both studies showed roughly a doubling of relative risk, the absolute risk and absolute number of people affected is very low.
“This aligns with the very low annual incidence of this rare disorder. One of the studies found that 2 people per 10,000 patients treated with semaglutide in a year developed NAION versus 1 out of every 10,000 in the comparator group, concluding that the absolute risk is very low,” the Novo Nordisk spokesperson wrote, adding that the studies did not demonstrate a causal relationship between semaglutide and NAION.
“Novo Nordisk, on its part, has conducted an analysis across randomized controlled clinical trials with GLP-1 receptor agonists, including a blinded ophthalmologist evaluation to confirm NAION diagnoses. Through this analysis, very few cases of ophthalmologist-confirmed NAION cases were identified, with no imbalance disfavoring Novo Nordisk GLP-1 receptor agonists.”
As Mohamed Elmasry, emeritus professor of computer engineering at the University of Waterloo, watched his 11- and 10-year-old grandchildren tapping away on their smartphones, he posed a simple question: “What’s one-third of nine?”
Instead of taking a moment to think, they immediately opened their calculator apps, he wrote in his book “iMind Artificial and Real Intelligence.”
Later, fresh from a family vacation in Cuba, he asked them to name the island’s capital. Once again, their fingers flew to their devices, Googling the answer rather than recalling their recent experience.
With 60 percent of the global population—and 97 percent of those younger than 30—using smartphones, technology has inadvertently become an extension of our thinking process.
However, everything comes at a cost. Cognitive outsourcing, which involves relying on external systems to collect or process information, may increase one’s risk of cognitive decline.
Habitual GPS (global positioning system) use, for example, has been linked to a significant decrease in spatial memory, reducing one’s ability to navigate independently. As AI applications such as ChatGPT become a household norm—with 55 percent of Americans reporting regular AI use—recent studies found that it is resulting in impaired critical thinking skills, dependency, loss of decision-making, and laziness.
Experts emphasize cultivating and prioritizing innate human skills that technology cannot replicate.
Neglected Real Intelligence
Referring to his grandkids and their overreliance on technology, Elmasry explained that they are far from “stupid.”
The problem is that they are not using their real intelligence.
They—and the rest of their generation—have grown accustomed to using apps and digital devices—unconsciously defaulting to internet search engines such as Google rather than thinking something through.
Just as physical muscles atrophy without use, so too do our cognitive abilities weaken when we let technology think for us.
A telling case is now called the “Google effect,” or digital amnesia, as shown in a 2011 study from Columbia University.
The current generation has grown accustomed to using apps and digital devices. hughhan/unsplash, Michael M. Santiago/Getty Images
Betsy Sparrow and colleagues at Columbia found that individuals tend to easily forget information that is readily available on the internet.
Their findings show that people are more likely to remember things they think are not available online. They are also better at recalling where to find information on the internet than recalling the information itself.
A 2021 study further tested the effects of Googling and found that participants who relied on search engines such as Google performed worse on learning assessments and memory recall than those who did not search online.
The study also shows that Googlers often had higher confidence that they had “mastered” the study material, indicating an overestimation in learning and ignorance of their learning deficit. Their overconfidence might be the result of having an “illusion of knowledge” bias—accessing information through search engines creates a false sense of personal expertise and diminishes people’s effort to learn.
Overreliance on technology is part of the problem, but having it around may be just as harmful. A study published in the Journal of the Association for Consumer Research discovered that “the mere presence” of a smartphone reduced “available cognitive capacity”—even if the phone was off or placed in a bag.
This “brain drain” effect likely occurs because the presence of a smartphone taps into our cognitive resources, subtly allocating our attention and making it harder to concentrate fully on the task at hand, researchers say. Not only does excessive tech use impair our cognition, but also, clinicians and researchers have noticed that it is linked to impaired social intelligence—the innate aspects that make us human.
Becoming Machine-Like
In the United States, children ages 8 to 12 typically spend four to six hours per day looking at screens, while teenagers may spend up to nine hours daily looking at screens. Further, 44 percent of teenagers feel anxious, and 39 percent feel lonely without their phones.
Excessive screen time reduces social interactions and emotional intelligence and has been linked to autistic-like symptoms, with longer durations of screen use correlated with more severe symptoms.
Dr. Jason Liu, a medical doctor who also has a doctorate in neuroscience, is a research scientist and founding president of the Mind-Body Science Institute International. Liu told The Epoch Times that he is particularly concerned about children’s use of digital media.
He said he has observed irregularities in his young patients who spend excessive time in the digital world—noticing their mechanical speech, lack of emotional expression, poor eye contact, and difficulty forming genuine human connections. Many exhibit attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) symptoms, responding with detachment and struggling with emotional fragility.
“We should not let technology replace our human nature,” Liu said.
Corroborating Liu’s observations, a JAMA studyfollowed about 3,000 adolescents with no prior ADHD symptoms over 24 months and found that a higher frequency of modern digital media use was associated with significantly higher odds of developing ADHD symptoms.
As early as 1998, scientists introduced the concept of the “Internet Paradox,” which is that the internet, despite being a “social tool,” leads to antisocial behavior.
Observing 73 households during their first years online, researchers noted that increased internet use was associated with reduced communication with family members, smaller social circles, and heightened depression and loneliness.
However, a three-year follow-up found that most of the adverse effects dissipated. The researcher explained this through a “rich get richer” model; introverts experienced more negative effects from the internet, while extroverts, with stronger social networks, benefited more and became more engaged in online communities, mitigating negative effects.
Manuel Garcia-Garcia, global lead of neuroscience at Ipsos, who holds a doctorate in neuroscience, told The Epoch Times that human-to-human connections are vital for building deeper connections and that while digital communication tools facilitate connectivity, they can lead to superficial interactions and impede social cues.
Supporting Liu’s observation of patients becoming “machine-like,” a Facebook emotional contagion experiment, conducted on nearly 700,000 users, manipulated news feeds to show more positive or negative posts. Users exposed to more positive content posted more positive updates, while those seeing more negative content posted more negative updates.
This demonstrated that technology can nudge human behavior in subtle yet systematic ways. This nudging, according to experts, can make our actions and emotions predictable, similar to programmed responses.
The Eureka Moment
“Sitting on your shoulders is the most complicated object in the known universe,” theoretical physicist Michio Kaku said.
While the most advanced technologies, including AI, may appear sophisticated, they are incommensurate with the human mind.
“AI is very smart, but not really,” Kathy Hirsh-Pasek, professor of psychology at Temple University and senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, told The Epoch Times. “It’s a machine algorithm that’s really good at predicting the next word. Full stop.”
The human brain is constructed developmentally, and it’s “not just given to us like a computer is in a box,” Hirsh-Pasek said. Our environment and experiences shape the intricate web of neural connections, 100 billion neurons interconnected by 100 trillion synapses.
Human learning thrives on meaning, emotion, and social interaction. Hirsh-Pasek noted that computer systems such as AI are indifferent to these elements. Machines only “learn” with the data they are fed, optimizing for the best possible output.
A cornerstone of human intelligence is the ability to learn through our senses, Jessica Russo, a clinical psychologist, told The Epoch Times. When we interact with our environment, we process a large amount of data from what we see, hear, taste, and touch.
AI systems cannot go beyond the information they have been given, and they, therefore, cannot truly produce anything new, Hirsh-Pasek said.
“[AI] is an exquisitely good synthesizer. It’s not an exquisitely good thinker,” she said.
AI lacks the intuitive capabilities of humans to truly understand the depth and authenticity of emotions, Dr. Sai Zuo, a psychiatrist in medical anthropology and social medicine, told The Epoch Times.
She said that certain aspects of human intelligence transcend scientists’ current understanding, suggesting that concepts such as inspiration originate from “a higher level of the universe.”
Many moments of inspiration have yielded breakthroughs in science development. While taking a bath, the ancient Greek mathematician Archimedes realized that the volume of an object could be determined by the amount of water it displaces, leading him to shout “Eureka!”—a discovery that established the principle of buoyancy. While taking a break, Albert Einstein imagined an experiment involving two lightning bolts, which led to the theory of special relativity.
Modern entertainment and technology, however, obstruct the generation of new ideas by reducing creativity.
For example, in our continually stimulated world, there is no space or time for boredom. However, boredom increases creativity and allows one to think of novel solutions.
Fortunately, there are effective ways to counteract technology’s negative influences and nourish our innate human capabilities.
A study showed that sixth graders who spent five days at a nature camp without technology demonstrated significant improvements in nonverbal emotional cues, such as reading facial emotions, compared with their peers who did not go.
Even setting reasonable limits can mitigate the adverse effects.
Young adults whose social media use was limited to 30 minutes a day for two weeks experienced lowered smartphone addiction and improved sleep, life satisfaction, stress, and relationships. According to Hirsh-Pasek, the key is balance.
Additionally, recent research found that simple interventions such as disabling nonessential notifications, keeping the phone on silent, disabling Touch ID and Face ID, hiding social media apps, and changing the phone to grayscale help lower screen time.
If a digital detox is unfeasible, research shows there are other ways to help.
Our brains engage in a vital cleaning process during sleep. Neurotoxic waste products accumulate throughout the day and are flushed out, contributing to the healthy function of brain cells.
Spirituality
Modern digital technology is synonymous with endless stimulation, separating us from important aspects of life, such as a peaceful mind.
“There’s really not much room to be spiritual when we’re so busy doing,” Russo said.
She noted that this culture is saddled with distractions—incessant emails, notifications, and news alerts. This causes our bodies to drown in dopamine.
This constant stimulation keeps us locked in a heightened stress response, the “fight or flight” response, flooding our systems with cortisol and adrenaline. Over time, this exhausts our minds and bodies, hindering our capacity for deeper thought and connection.
Spirituality, Russo said, is about rediscovering the meaning of “spirit”—derived from spiritus, the Latin word for “breath.” It’s about slowing down, taking a deep breath, and being fully present in each moment.
Spiritual practices encourage meaningful connections, including empathy and emotional intelligence.
They can also enhance cognitive abilities such as creativity, attention, meaning-making, and purpose. These practices engage our minds in ways that differ from and potentially complement the information retrieval common in our techno-centric world.
The Choice Before Us
We are standing at a precipice of technological advancement, according to Hirsh-Pasek, with things such as AI and the metaverse advancing daily. The challenge and the opportunity lie in ensuring that technology enhances rather than diminishes our humanity.
Technology can grant huge benefits, and in the future, “there will be many, many wonderful things,” Hirsh-Pasek said.
However, she said: “The human species [has] a social brain—that is who we are. The more we chip away at that social nature of humanity, the more we chip away at our possibilities as a species.”
Liu warns against placing blind faith in digital technology, including AI.
“We only know part of the universe’s unlimited intelligence,” he said, and an overreliance on digital technology risks limiting our pursuit of more profound, unexplainable, and inspired knowledge.
Humans possess a unique spirit, soul, morality, and heart that connect us to the divine. Overdependence on technology threatens to atrophy these aspects of our being, he said.
Moreover, Liu noted that if human morals are lost, we will inadvertently teach AI to do bad things and use technology for wrongdoing.
“Above all, the most important thing is for human beings to focus on their own cultivation—the improvement of [their] human nature,” he said.
This includes cultivating “human love, compassion, understanding of each other, and forgiveness.”
Liu said he believes that these values are humanity’s true strength and the keys to unlocking a future in which technology serves, rather than controls, our destiny. The choice, as always, is ours.
The extremely closely contested provincial election in British Columbia illustrates both the rise of conservatism and the peculiar tenacity of the leftist New Democratic Party in B.C.
The trend to the responsible right is general in the Western world and is the appropriate response to the wokeness, fiscal irresponsibility, muddled view of the collective, and individual national interest of the Western nations. It denotes an entirely understandable rising boredom with the platitudes of supposedly post-national human brotherhood, as well as the exaggerated claims and extremist techniques of environmental extremism.
But B.C.’s imperishable susceptibility to the call of a leftist party has a source that is a little harder to identify. Because it is such a beautiful place, and Vancouver and some other cities are wedged picturesquely between the ocean and the mountains—a majestic situation reminiscent of Naples, Sydney, San Francisco, Rio de Janeiro, and other magnificent port cities—there is perhaps a larger than-is-justified weakness for taking seriously overzealous claims about what it takes to protect the province’s natural beauty. It may have something to do with the fact that the post-Cold War militancy of the environmental movement is traceable to its effective takeover from authentic conservationists by the militant international left, defeated in the Cold War but tactically regrouped with great skill of improvisation to attack capitalism from the new angle of ecology in the name of defending the planet.
Because British Columbia is also primarily an economy of resource extraction, chiefly base metals and forest products, the labour movement is, by Canadian standards, unusually strong, and has no trouble making common cause with the academic and theoretical preoccupation with the environment—as long as the unionized mining and forestry industry workers can translate their environmental concern into more pay for less work. In this conception, less work is less spoliation of the environment, and B.C. makes a unique laboratory for the competition between enlightened capitalism and the unstable alliance between militant environmentalism and a labour movement claiming a right to be paid more while helping to preserve the environment by doing less.
Historically, the third party in Canada, originally the Co-operative Commonwealth Federation, which became the New Democratic Party in 1961, was an alliance between Prairie agricultural dissent from the governing Canadian economic system and Eastern labour dissent from the managerial capitalism of Ontario and Quebec. These forces were represented by the first leaders of the NDP: Tommy Douglas, the moderate premier of Saskatchewan, and David Lewis, the moderate Toronto labour lawyer. Initially, B.C.’s environmentalists gradually became an exotic addition to this core of Canada‘s overtly socialist party, but they have since become a full-fledged member of a triad of support and have substantially replaced the old Prairie agricultural populism, which has become more conservative with increasing prosperity.
The Oct. 20 election in B.C. is apt to remain of uncertain outcome for up to two weeks. At least, as is usual in Canada, there is no suggestion of election irregularities or illicit activities. It is an authentically very close contest. This indicates the war for the hearts and minds of British Columbians, which for a long time depended on the Bennetts’ Social Credit Party, which was essentially a Liberal-Conservative coalition, forcing the NDP to split the vote with an underfed provincial Liberal Party. W.A.C. Bennett was premier from 1952 to 1972, and his son, Bill Bennett, was premier from 1975 to 1986. When Social Credit expired as the anachronism it was (no one, including the Bennetts, paid any attention to the founding doctrine of Major Douglas about spreading money around amongst disadvantaged people), the provincial Liberal Party became effectively a Conservative-Liberal coalition, which is what the provincial Conservative party is now.
What is mystifying is that British Columbians would seriously consider re-electing political parties so self-punitively to the left as the incumbents. This government surreptitiously attempted to hand over co-ownership of over 90 percent of the province’s territory to a comparative handful of indigenous people, and to disguise this fact from the public. It was an astounding combination of confiscatory legislation with official deviousness and pusillanimity in disguising the extent of the proposed deception.
The combination of finding every conceivable environmental reason for delaying the extraction and export of B.C.’s resources and frustrating the whole province in guilt-ridden deference to the indigenous peoples, and thus obstructing almost every development project based on more sophisticated land use, has consistently retarded the economic progress of the province. That and other policy nostrums have made B.C. a notorious and failed laboratory for woke and politically correct behaviour. The experiment with unfettered marijuana distribution has been a disaster. The attempt to treat hard drug addicts by a system of voluntary gradualism has also been a disaster. Only the fact that it is such a naturally splendid place could possibly explain the extent of public indulgence in stupid and destructive policies.
From the perspective of the federal Conservative Party, however this provincial election turns out, the news is relatively good: it means that the Conservatives should be well ahead of the Liberals in federal MPs from B.C. in the next election, and whatever the NDP can preserve in that election should accelerate the Conservatives on their way to being the governing party in the succeeding Parliament.
Additionally, whether the NDP ends up having won this election or not, with or without the collaboration of the two Green MP’s who have been elected, the party has suffered a serious setback from its previous position, and the emerging trend incites and justifies some optimism that British Columbia is at least proceeding towards a return to its political senses.
Views expressed in this article are opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.
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