People who suffered sudden, permanent vision loss after taking Ozempic, Wegovy, Mounjaro, or a related medication are suing the drugmakers in a growing GLP-1 blindness lawsuit, alleging that Novo Nordisk and Eli Lilly knew their diabetes and weight-loss drugs could trigger a blinding eye condition called NAION and failed to warn anyone. More than 100 cases have been consolidated in a federal multidistrict litigation in Pennsylvania, with a parallel state proceeding in New Jersey. No trials have happened yet.
The Injury at the Center of the Cases
The lawsuits are built around non-arteritic anterior ischemic optic neuropathy, or NAION. Blood flow to the optic nerve is suddenly cut off, and the person typically wakes up unable to see out of part of one eye. There is no proven treatment to reverse the damage. About a third of patients see some mild spontaneous improvement; for most, the loss is permanent.
NAION is rare, striking roughly 2 to 10 people per 100,000 each year. It has long-standing links to diabetes, hypertension, cardiovascular disease, and a structural feature of the eye called a “disc at risk.” That overlap with diabetes is one of the hardest problems in the litigation: the same patients being prescribed these drugs already sit in the higher-risk pool for NAION on their own.
Who Can File a GLP-1 Blindness Lawsuit
To bring a claim, you generally need three things:
- A confirmed diagnosis of NAION, ideally from a neuro-ophthalmologist.
- A prescription history showing you were taking one of the named GLP-1 receptor agonist drugs.
- Evidence that the vision loss began after you started the drug, not before.
Having diabetes does not disqualify you. It does mean your case will require expert evaluation of whether the medication caused or worsened the condition beyond what your underlying health would explain on its own. State statutes of limitations typically run one to three years from the date of the injury or from when you reasonably connected it to the drug, so the clock matters.
Which Drugs and Companies Are Named
The complaints target two manufacturers and their GLP-1 products:
- Novo Nordisk’s semaglutide drugs: Ozempic, Wegovy, and Rybelsus, along with Victoza and Saxenda.
- Eli Lilly’s tirzepatide drugs: Mounjaro and Zepbound. Trulicity, another Lilly GLP-1, has also appeared in filings.
The two companies do not stand in identical positions. At least one clinical source cited in the litigation has noted that tirzepatide was not linked to increased NAION risk in a global analysis, which could give Lilly a defense distinct from Novo Nordisk’s.
Where the Cases Are Being Heard
On December 15, 2025, the Judicial Panel on Multidistrict Litigation created MDL 3163, In Re: GLP-1 Receptor Agonists NAION Products Liability Litigation, and transferred an initial 20 cases to the Eastern District of Pennsylvania. Judge Karen S. Marston is presiding. By mid-2026, more than 100 federal cases were pending.
A separate state-court proceeding runs alongside the federal MDL. In October 2025, the New Jersey Supreme Court created a multicounty litigation for GLP-1 vision loss claims, centralized in Bergen County before Superior Court Judge Gregg A. Padovano. All pending and future New Jersey state cases against Novo Nordisk, Eli Lilly, and Lilly USA must be filed or transferred there. The federal and state proceedings are not consolidated.
Neither track is a class action. Each plaintiff keeps an individual lawsuit and their own attorney, and any recovery turns on that person’s medical history and injuries. The MDL and MCL structures only consolidate the pretrial phases.
What Plaintiffs Are Claiming
The core theory is failure to warn. Plaintiffs allege that Novo Nordisk and Eli Lilly had clinical trial data, adverse event reports, and published research pointing to a NAION risk and chose not to update their labels or alert doctors and patients. One complaint filed against Eli Lilly in May 2026 alleged the company had “actual and constructive knowledge” of a link between Mounjaro and NAION dating back to 2016, based on studies identifying GLP-1 receptors in the human eye.
Beyond failure to warn, complaints raise defective design, inadequate pre-clinical and post-marketing testing, and misleading marketing of the drugs’ safety. Plaintiffs are seeking compensation for medical expenses, lost wages and earning capacity, pain and suffering, diminished quality of life, and costs tied to long-term care or home modifications made necessary by the vision loss.
What Novo Nordisk and Eli Lilly Say
Novo Nordisk denies that NAION is an adverse drug reaction to its products. A company spokesperson told NBC News that “NAION is not an adverse drug reaction to Ozempic and other GLP-1s” and that the company’s “benefit-risk profile of semaglutide remains unchanged.” The company points to its own internal analysis of randomized controlled trials, which it says used blinded ophthalmologist evaluations and found “very few cases of ophthalmologist-confirmed NAION” with “no imbalance disfavoring Novo Nordisk GLP-1 receptor agonists.” Novo Nordisk has also framed eye conditions as “well-known comorbidities for people living with diabetes,” implying the injuries reflect patients’ underlying disease rather than a drug effect.
Eli Lilly’s public legal position is less documented but the company is a co-defendant in both the federal MDL and the New Jersey state litigation.
The Science the Case Will Turn On
The litigation traces back to a study published in JAMA Ophthalmology in August 2024 by researchers at Massachusetts Eye and Ear, led by Joseph F. Rizzo III. Reviewing more than 16,800 patients seen between December 2017 and November 2023, the team found that semaglutide patients with type 2 diabetes had a 36-month cumulative NAION incidence of 8.9%, compared to 1.8% for those on other drugs. Among patients with overweight or obesity, the figures were 6.7% versus 0.8%. The authors cautioned that their single-center, observational study likely overstated the risk compared to what would be seen in the general population.
Later research has cut in different directions. A large Danish-Norwegian cohort study published in 2025, covering more than 44,500 semaglutide users in Denmark and nearly 16,900 in Norway, found a pooled hazard ratio of 2.81 for NAION, but the absolute risk stayed low, about 1.4 additional cases per 10,000 person-years. A 2026 systematic review by Eisa and Barood identified several large studies that found no statistically significant increase when researchers compared semaglutide patients to patients on other metabolically similar drugs rather than to the general population; one Military Health System study of more than 1.2 million patients actually found a lower rate among semaglutide users. An FDA-commissioned Sentinel System study also reported no increased incidence within six months of starting semaglutide, though that work may still be ongoing.
The American Academy of Ophthalmology and the North American Neuro-Ophthalmology Society issued a joint consensus statement in May 2026 that stopped short of recommending patients discontinue the drugs, citing a “lack of evidence for a causative link” and calling for “shared decision-making” between patients and doctors.
Why the Regulatory Split Matters to Plaintiffs
In June 2025, the European Medicines Agency’s safety committee concluded that NAION is a “very rare” side effect of semaglutide, affecting up to 1 in 10,000 people, and ordered updated labels for Ozempic, Wegovy, and Rybelsus. The EMA directed that patients experiencing sudden vision loss contact a doctor immediately and that semaglutide be stopped if NAION is confirmed.
The U.S. Food and Drug Administration has taken no equivalent action. As of mid-2026, American labels for semaglutide products carry no NAION warning. The FDA did update Ozempic’s label in October 2025, but only to add that the drug “is not recommended in patients with severe gastroparesis.” Plaintiffs point to that contrast: the U.S. regulator moved on a stomach risk while the vision issue sits unaddressed, even as European regulators acted.
This Is Not the Stomach-Injury MDL
The GLP-1 vision loss cases are frequently confused with the larger, older litigation over gastrointestinal injuries like gastroparesis and bowel obstruction. They are separate. MDL 3094, created in February 2024, handles the stomach injury claims and had roughly 3,763 pending federal cases as of June 2026. MDL 3163, created in December 2025, handles only the NAION vision loss claims. Both are before Judge Marston and both involve the same defendants, but the medical experts, injuries, and timelines are different. Someone who suffered both types of harm could potentially have claims in both proceedings.
Timing and What Happens Next
The vision loss MDL is in its early stages. Judge Marston held a “Science Day” on June 2, 2026, with experts from both sides presenting educational material on how GLP-1 medications interact with ocular blood flow and how NAION is diagnosed. Discovery, expert challenges, and the selection of bellwether cases still lie ahead. No trial dates have been set. Legal observers do not expect the first bellwether trials before late 2026, and 2027 is more likely.
If you think you have a claim, the practical priorities are documenting the NAION diagnosis, gathering your prescription records for the specific GLP-1 drug you took, and checking your state’s statute of limitations before it runs. The litigation is active and accepting new plaintiffs, but the filing window in any given state is not open indefinitely.