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The Most Powerful Obesity Drug Yet Has a Hidden Benefit—and It Happens While You Sleep

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The Most Powerful Obesity Drug Yet Has a Hidden Benefit—and It Happens While You Sleep

Eli Lilly’s highly anticipated weight loss drug retatrutide may also do wonders for people’s restless nights, recent research shows.

Last week, researchers published two trials of retatrutide looking at how it affected people with obstructive sleep apnea. In both trials, the experimental drug significantly reduced symptoms compared to a placebo, they found. The findings are the latest to suggest that effective weight loss treatments like retatrutide and similar GLP-1 drugs can also help manage sleep apnea.

Retatrutide is part of the next generation of obesity and diabetes medications that leverage certain kinds of hunger-related hormones like GLP-1. Retatrutide in particular mimics GLP-1, GIP, and the hormone glucagon.

Large-scale randomized, placebo-controlled, and double-blinded studies so far have shown that retatrutide may be the most potent obesity drug developed yet. Given these results, the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) and other regulatory agencies are almost certain to grant Eli Lilly an approval for retatrutide next year. Obesity is also known to raise the risk of other health conditions, including obstructive sleep apnea (OSA), so Eli Lilly decided to test whether retatrutide could have added benefits there as well.

The company carried out two separate trials of retatrutide for OSA, both nestled within the larger phase III trials of the drug. One trial involved people with type 2 diabetes and obesity who also had OSA, while the other involved people with OSA and obesity without diabetes. In total, these trials included roughly 700 participants.

Sleep apnea is defined by having multiple and sustained (10 seconds or longer) episodes of no breathing throughout the night—anywhere from 5 to 100 times an hour.


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