Woman develops large, mucus-covered mass in her stomach after taking GLP-1 how chugging diet cola cured it

A woman went to the ER to deal with severe abdominal pain, nausea, and vomiting.She thought it might be due to stress.It turned out to be a goopy green mass that formed in her stomach — with a little help from her GLP-1.The 63-year-old was seen by doctors at Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston.

She told them she’d been taking semaglutide, a GLP-1 sold as Ozempic and Wegovy, for about a year.But over the past month, she began vomiting and experiencing nausea, along with severe pain around her torso.Though she lost significant weight on the drug, the weight loss accelerated over the past month, coinciding with the nausea and vomiting.Doctors ran a number of tests, including a CT scan that showed stool backed up in her digestive tract, but they couldn’t see anything blocking it from passing.

With an endoscope —  a thin, flexible tube with a camera and light at the end — doctors found the culprit.They saw a “large, greenish, gooey-looking mass covered in mucus” in her stomach.It was a bezoar, which affects at most 4 in 1,000 people.

While it wasn’t blocking the opening to the small intestine, it was taking up a lot of space and making it harder for food to pass through.Bezoars are tightly packed masses of undigested or partially digested food, usually in the stomach.There are a few different types.

Phytobezoars form from eating too much cellulose-rich food, like celery, prunes, raisins and pumpkin.Trichobezoars form from hair.In her case, doctors believe delayed gastric emptying caused the bezoar to form.Gastric emptying is the process of food moving from the stomach into the small intestine.

If it’s delayed — a condition called gastroparesis — food can accumulate and harden into a bezoar.This slowing of food movement also happens to be one of the main effects of GLP-1s.It helps people feel fuller for longer, slows the rate at which carbs are broken down and prevents sugar from flooding the bloodstream.But GLP-1s are known for someti...