The drug tirzepatide is marketed as Mounjaro and Zepbound by pharmaceutical company Eli Lilly and belongs to the same class of drugs as semaglutide. A popular weight-loss drug may help people who struggle with a serious sleep disorder, according to a new study. Tirzepatide, the medication in the weight-loss drug Zepbound and the diabetes treatment Mounjaro, appeared to reduce the severity of sleep apnoea, according to a new study.
The findings were in the New England Journal of Medicine last week, and included 469 people with obesity and obstructive sleep apnoea (OSA). OSA is a disorder where people stop breathing while they are asleep because the tissue in the throat relaxes and collapses during sleep, fully or partially blocking the airway. Tirzepatide also reduced weight and improved blood pressure in patients with obesity who took the drug for a year.
Half of them used what's typically known as a CPAP machine that feeds oxygen through a mask to keep airways open during sleep while the other group included people for whom a CPAP machine had failed or wasn't tolerated. Patients who received weekly injections of tirzepatide reduced the number of episodes per hour that their breathing slowed or stopped during sleep by about half to nearly 60 per cent, compared to about 10 per cent in people who got a dummy drug. Up to half of the patients taking tirzepatide reduced the apnoea episodes enough to potentially resolve the disorder, compared with up to 16 per cent of those using t.
