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Comment by vrc | Hacker News Reader

The risk of pancreatitis is also increased substantially [0]. And for people who may already be predisposed to pancreatitis but haven’t had an attack, severe pancreatitis has a 10-30% mortality rate [1]. But even mild acute pancreatitis will make you want to crawl out of your own skin in pain.

[0] https://www.hopkinsmedicine.org/news/media/releases/johns_ho...

[1] https://www.aafp.org/pubs/afp/issues/2007/0515/p1513.html

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So I was able to find an aggregate of the study results:

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8294388/

out of an n of >3000 patients getting medication, 34 ended up having some form of pancreatitis. At least 12 people on placebo got pancreatitis. That's a much higher rate, but the odds are still pretty low.

I'm somewhat dubious of the severe pancreatitis mortality rates-- the issue is that most cases of severe pancreatitis are caused by very severe alcoholism, and by the time the pancreatitis shows up everything else is already failing.

That’s not entirely true. Pancreatitis, especially necrotizing pancreatitis, actually causes the broad systemic organ dysfunction. So even alcoholics with fine organs can end up with liver, lung, heart, kidney, etc complications from a severe bout of pancreatitis. Even basic things like fluid balance and endocrine function can be thrown way off by both the disease and treatment (large amounts of fluid resuscitation). I recently had severe bouts of non-alcoholic pancreatitis, the worst of which ended in a 3 month hospital stay with various periods on ventilators and various organ dysfunction. My imaging and bloodwork from 3 weeks prior were clean (I do them routinely since the pancreatitis is recurring).

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