“Having gained 9 kg in just one month, thank you Periactin! » On TikTok, a young woman reveals her generous curves to her 31,000 subscribers while waddling. In passing, she promotes this antiallergic medication, available in pharmacies or on the Internet and often misused to gain weight and “grow the buttocks”.
The goal, touted with lots of “stories”? Look like the American star Kim Kardashian or the French influencer Maeva Ghennam, for example. A risky “misuse”, which leads the National Medicines Safety Agency (ANSM) to ban the over-the-counter sale of the antiallergic, it announced this Thursday, June 27. From July 10, a prescription will be required to obtain Periactin, based on the molecule cyproheptadine.
“This decision is going in the right direction”
Intended to treat allergic symptoms such as rhinitis, conjunctivitis or hives, this medication is also known to increase appetite… and therefore, cause weight gain. But like all others, it can cause undesirable effects such as drowsiness, palpitations, or even vision problems. And this, especially among young women eager to round out their shapes and lured by social networks without the slightest medical advice.
“This decision is a step in the right direction!” reacts Dr. Laurent Chouchana, head of a pharmacovigilance center in Paris and member of the French Society of Pharmacology and Therapeutics (SFPT). “We raised the alarm in 2022 when we saw real prescriptions for weight gain on social networks, then we raised the alarm again in 2023 to say that we needed to at least reassess the benefit/risk balance of this drug,” he adds.
Initial “awareness” measures were taken in 2022, but this was not enough to stop the misuse. “We are basing our information on feedback from pharmacovigilance centers, what we see on social media, etc.”, Dr. Isabelle Yoldjian, medical director of the ANSM, told us. Last December, a 13-year-old girl suffered severe palpitations due to an overdose of Periactine, swallowed to “inflate” her curves.
A trend emerging in Africa
Until 1994, this treatment was officially indicated to increase the appetite in people losing weight. The benefit/risk balance was then considered insufficient but the misuse, which first appeared in African countries, gradually arrived in Europe, and particularly in France. In Kinshasa (Democratic Republic of Congo), according to a study published in 2016, 70% of Periactin doses were aimed at gaining weight. “It was mainly a population of young women who used it for long periods (greater than a year),” notes the SFPT.
Even to combat allergies, there are today other medications that are much better tolerated and more effective than Periactin. The number of boxes delivered to pharmacies each year, which has become quite low, continues to decrease: 281,000 in 2021, then 197,000 in 2022 and 185,000 last year. But Internet sales are impossible to quantify.
Other treatments, such as the antidiabetic Ozempic, are misused to… lose weight. “They are two sides of the same coin,” illustrates Laurent Chouchana. And Isabelle Yoldjian concludes: “We are in the same fight: the fight against the use of drugs for aesthetic purposes. When you leave the medical field, it can become extremely dangerous. »
