New voices have come forward with complaints about a possible link between the GLP-1 weight loss drugs and blindness.
It’s a nightmare Ed Gillen says he can’t wake up from.
“There’s no warning sign at all, there’s no pain, it just comes. It just comes.”
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It started with what he thought was some sort of floater in his eye.
“I woke up on a Saturday morning and had a spec in my eye.”
Just a few doctors appointments later, Gillen was in the dark.
“I was completely blacked out,” he said.
The father of four, state highway worker and beloved softball coach now needs a walking stick to get around.
“I was very good at my job. And now I got to learn this, a new job of being blind,” Gillen said.
His doctors call it “Ozempic blindness.” The clinical name is NAION, basically an eye stroke.
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Channel 2 Action News Investigates first told you about it in July when we introduced you to a Georgia woman who ended up legally blind in one eye just weeks after starting her GLP-1 shots.
“If I would’ve read that there was a possibility I could lose my vision, I would’ve never taken this drug,” Diane Wirth said.
She filed a lawsuit. And so did Gillen, who was on the shot for almost a year for his A1-C.
Maker Novo-Nordisk told Channel 2 Action News that it conducted its own study and did not find any increased risk.
Wirth and Gillen’s lawsuits join others set to go before a Philadelphia judge that blames the drug maker for not being transparent about the rare, but serious side effect.
“I knew there were some. Because you hear it on the commercials, you hear an advertiser, your doctor tells you them, but not this. Not this.”
The lawsuit could take years. Channel 2 Action News will stay on this and let you know what happens along the way.
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