More women seek help to counteract tired ‘Ozempic face’
Experts warn of ageing side effects of ‘miracle’ weight loss injection
IRISH cosmetic clinics are treating more people for ‘Ozempic face’ – or looking ‘a little bit shook’ – as use of the jab becomes more widespread here.
Ozempic has been lauded as a miracle weight loss treatment on social media with heavy celebrity endorsement. The medication is not prescribed for weight loss but is used to treat type 2 diabetes.
However, some who have lost weight after obtaining the drug online or through ‘off-label’ prescriptions have been left with an ageing and sagging face branded ‘Ozempic face’ in the US.
Dr Sana Askary, the founder of the Sitara Medical Clinic in the Beacon Hospital Dublin, said the phenomenon is ‘definitely on the rise in Ireland, as well as globally’.
Asked if more people are unhappy with how their face looks after losing a lot of weight, Dr Askary told the Irish Mail on Sunday: ‘It’s only in more recent times but I am hearing every single day when I’m at work – “I’ve lost a lot of weight and it’s affecting my face”.’
‘The effects are caused by rapid shrinking of fat pads’
The effects are caused by the rapid shrinking of fat pads, which normally happens over years.
Dr Askary added: ‘You get a little bit gaunt looking – you can have quite significant volume loss. Where we see it especially is in the cheeks, under the eyes.
‘It makes a kind of jowling in the jawline, a little bit more prominent because the fat is what’s structuring your face – it was keeping your face taut and lifted.
‘Other rapid – and growingly popular – weight loss procedures such as gastric bands are often mentioned too and can have the same effects.
‘The thing about Ozempic face or the effects that it’s having on your face, it’s not actually from the drug itself, it’s the rapid weight loss.
‘But people are just deciding that they want to make that change, whether it’s with the help of drugs, surgery or lifestyle changes.’
Ozempic works – for some – by convincing the body it feels full after eating less food than usual and it stops working when the user stops taking it.
Dr Askary said she ‘would argue that someone who loses the weight a little bit more slowly [through diet and exercise] will have the opportunity to tighten their skin a bit along the way’.
She said the undesired effects of weight loss were ‘quite easy to treat with filler or the likes of sculpture’ but that means spending ‘more money’ on top of the cost of the drug.
It is hard to know how prevalent the drug is, Dr Askary said, as patients can be ‘a bit reluctant to offer that information. But if you see someone who’s lost a lot of weight and they’re not offering that information, sometimes you kind of assume they’ve gone down the Ozempic route’.
She added: ‘It’s really difficult – I would argue it’s almost impossible – to get these kinds of changes in that kind of timeline without the use of something like Ozempic.’ Dr Askary said she has seen ‘a lot of people’ who look and feel better after taking Ozempic or undergoing another weight loss procedure.
Ireland’s foremost obesity expert, Professor Donal O’Shea, said any treatment that causes weight loss ‘is going to leave you looking a little bit shook – a little bit older’.
Professor O’Shea, who is consultant endocrinologist at St Vincent’s Hospital and the HSE’s national clinical lead for obesity, told the MoS: ‘When we were doing clinical trials with [Ozempic], we had one lady whose weight went from nearly 105 kilos down to 75 kilos. Her family were coming in pleading with us to stop the treatment, that she was looking awful, she was fading away to nothing, are we sure she didn’t have cancer? And that’s the look if you lose 30 or 40 kilos.’
He also expressed concern that the popular drugs has been ‘hijacked by social media and by the Kardashians and Elon Musk as this panacea for quick weight loss’.
Clinical results show a third of people who take Ozempic or other drugs with its active ingredient ‘lose a significant amount of weight’, a third lose ‘a little bit’ and a third lose ‘nothing and just get side effects’.
These include nausea, constipation, dizziness and palpitations.
Professor O’Shea added: ‘It’s not currently available as a licensed weight loss drug – that will come later this year.
‘It, and other drugs like it but more effective than it, will be available in Ireland later this year.’ Professor O’Shea expects the licensing to be similar to Saxenda, which can be prescribed to someone with a BMI over 35 and complications of obesity.
He added: ‘Medically we want to be treating complicated obesity. But there are people who have obesity who do not have complications and they wouldn’t benefit and haven’t been shown to benefit from treatment with Ozempic.
‘If you’re taking it because you want to be thinner, but you don’t meet the criteria, then you’re taking the risk of having a drug with potential side effects and no proven benefits. And a lot of people seem happy to do that.’