A severe allergic reaction needs urgent help
For severe allergic symptoms, call 911 or get help at the nearest emergency room.
Ask about common and serious effects
Nausea means feeling sick to your stomach. Ask how to contact the person writing your prescription if unwanted effects make eating or drinking difficult.
Gastroparesis means the stomach empties very slowly.
Swelling in the pancreas may show up as severe belly pain or belly pain that persists. The pain may also reach the back. The pancreas is an organ in the belly that helps with digestion. The medicine label reports this serious problem.
Ask the person treating you which symptoms need urgent medical help and how to get help. Keep the reply with the instructions given for your medicine.
The thyroid findings, in plain words
A boxed warning is the strongest label warning used by the US medicine regulator, the Food and Drug Administration (FDA).
The labels exclude people who have had medullary thyroid carcinoma, or whose family has a history of this rare thyroid cancer.
The labels also exclude anyone with MEN 2, the shortened name for multiple endocrine neoplasia type 2. This is a rare condition passed down in families. Have your treating professional look for either name in your records and in any diagnoses in your family. A serious allergic reaction in the past also rules out this medicine, whether the cause was semaglutide itself or any other ingredient it contains.
Bring pregnancy and procedure plans into the discussion
General anesthesia keeps you unconscious during an operation. Deep sedation makes you deeply sleepy during a procedure and hard to wake. The label asks you to tell the team about semaglutide before any planned operation or procedure because stomach contents can enter the lungs.
Ask that team to explain the plan for the procedure; the label says available evidence does not settle whether stopping beforehand lowers this risk.
Pause at an offer with no prescription
FDA has also reported hospital care after dose errors involving compounded injectable semaglutide.