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Blocking the popular weight-loss drug Zepbond appears to help people with sleep apnea, drugmaker Eli Lilly said Wednesday.
Based on the results of its trials in people with sleep apnea, the company said it plans to submit the material to the U.S. Food and Drug Administration to expand the use of Zepbond for sleep apnea.
Obstructive sleep apnea A condition that causes people to stop breathing briefly during sleep, sometimes several times an hour. This condition can cause a person to not feel completely rested, because when the body realizes that it is not breathing, the brain wakes up. The disease can bring people Very exposed To develop other serious health problems such as heart attack, heart attack and stroke. of World Health Organization Around 100 million people worldwide have this disease.
While people are more likely to develop sleep apnea as they age, it often occurs when people gain weight and are overweight or obese. Fatty deposits around the upper respiratory tract become an obstruction, stopping normal breathing. Previous studies have shown It helps improve sleep apnea when people lose weight.
The US Food and Drug Administration has approved Zepbound to treat obesity In NovemberR. The drug contains the active ingredient tirzepatide, which was first approved in 2022 under the name Mounjaro to treat type 2 diabetes. Some doctors have been prescribing the weekly injection for people with obstructive sleep apnea, and Lilly has been testing the drug for sleep apnea since June 2022.
The company announced its first results Studies On Wednesday, adult patients with obesity and obstructive sleep apnea treated with the drug showed improvement in their sleep apnea compared to adults who did not take the drug. The hearing was attended by over 400 people.
“We were very pleased to see this large result, which to my knowledge is the largest ever seen in this disease.” Dr. Daniel SkowronskiEli Lilly's chief scientific officer told in a phone interview.
One study looked at the drug's effect on people who were unwilling or unable to use positive airway pressure (PAP) therapy, a machine that pumps pressurized air into the airways to keep them open and prevent breathing problems while sleeping. People using the machine have to use a mask or a nose and some people have trouble sleeping with the device. The other study looked at a group that had used or planned to continue using a PAP machine.
of Late tests have shown When people took the drug, there were fewer episodes of breathing during sleep, compared to those who did not take the drug. There seems to be little difference between people who use PAP therapy.
In this part of the study, people who took the drug also lost weight. Since starting the experiment, they have seen an average weight loss of over 18%. Those on placebo lost 1.3%, the company said.
Over a year, people with moderate-to-severe obstructive sleep apnea taking the drug and not using PAP therapy had a reduction of 27.4 events per hour compared to 4.8 events per hour in participants who received placebo.
In a second study, researchers found that people who used or planned to use PAP therapy and took the drug saw a slightly higher reduction in sleep-related events. Over the course of 52 weeks, those who took the drug had an average of 6 fewer events per hour compared to 30.4 events per hour in those who received a placebo. In the second study, people on the drug saw a 20.1% weight loss from baseline compared to 2.3% of those taking the placebo.
The weight loss seen with tirzepatide reduced what's commonly known as subcutaneous fat, says Skovronsky, or “the fat in the soft tissue under the skin, which is what you see in the mirror and register on the scale, because that's where it's at.” Most of it is fat storage.
But, he says, sleep apnea is caused by “ectopic fat deposits, that is, fat that accumulates in places that don't normally exist” — around the tongue and windpipe, for example, which “occludes the airway while you sleep.”
A key question the studies sought to answer was whether tirzepatide reduces ectopic fat deposits, among others Studies It has also been shown to have an effect on visceral fat located around the body and associated with disease.
“We didn't know exactly how well it would work in this rare situation, it might be good at clearing the fat around the airway, or it might be behind the subcutaneous fat where it's normally concentrated,” Skovronsky said.
Treating sleep apnea this way, his team says, is not like “symptomatic therapy that opens the airways like CPAP,” but instead, “eliminating the natural causes of sleep apnea in these patients is big news.”
The results have not yet been peer-reviewed or published in a medical journal. Eli Lilly told that he is still reviewing the results and will share details at the American Diabetes Association meeting in June.
's Meg Tirell and Amanda Seeley contributed to this report.