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Retatrutide, a next-generation GLP-1 weight-loss drug, is not yet approved for use. Nevertheless, online forums reveal that people are purchasing unapproved versions of the drug, which are not intended for human consumption, and sharing their experiences.

Now, researchers at the University of Pennsylvania have used AI to take a closer look at these online conversations, analyzing nearly 150,000 posts and comments from roughly 40,000 Reddit users to provide the first systematic look at the kind of side effects these users claim to be experiencing.

"Our goal is to identify hypotheses in online conversations that we could test. AI helps us find recurring patterns in people's self-reports, including experiences that may be missed by conventional drug-safety monitoring," says Sharath Chandra Guntuku, research associate professor in computer and information science (CIS), director of Penn's Computational Social Listening Lab and senior author of a new paper in JAMA Network Open.

Among Reddit users who shared classifiable potential symptoms, the most frequently reported symptom was increased appetite, which differs from retatrutide's phase 2 clinical trials, where gastrointestinal complaints were identified as the most common side effects.

Because of the Reddit sample's limitations, the researchers underscore that their findings should be treated with caution. These differences do not establish that retatrutide causes the reported symptoms or that the experiences of the Reddit users reflect those of the clinical trial participants, but rather point to the kinds of patterns that AI-assisted analysis can uncover.

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