When a 57-year-old man's unpleasant body odor disappeared after he stopped the diabetes drug dulaglutide, his doctors did not stop there. They gave him the drug again, and the smell came back. Then they switched him to semaglutide, a drug from the same class, and the odor never returned.
The case, reported by doctors in Croatia, drew notice because body odor had not previously been recognized as a side effect of dulaglutide, sold in the United States as Trulicity. Its final twist may matter more to the many people now taking GLP-1 medicines. Other case reports describe the reverse pattern, reactions tied to one GLP-1 drug that did not occur on another. Together, they raise a practical question: when a GLP-1 drug causes an unusual problem, does switching to a sibling drug help?
