How drugs like Ozempic can help treat asthma — even if you don’t have diabetes

Asthma sufferers, get pumped!

Managing asthma often requires a two-pronged approach — long-term medicines to prevent attacks and rescue strategies to stop attacks when they happen. It’s important to avoid triggers and monitor breathing.

New research out of the UK suggests that GLP-1 medications like Ozempic and Victoza may provide long-term asthma relief — in addition to shrinking waistlines.

“This study is a good reminder that GLP-1s shouldn’t just be labeled as ‘weight loss drugs,’” Dr. Michael Snyder, who was not involved in the new study, told The Post.

“They’re part of a broader shift in medicine toward treating chronic diseases at the systems level.”

Researchers from the University of Aberdeen and the Observational and Pragmatic Research Institute studied over 10,000 obese, asthmatic patients taking GLP-1 drugs, comparing them to about 50,000 adults who had similar medical histories but were not taking GLP-1s.

The GLP-1 users had fewer asthma attacks and symptoms after a year, though there wasn’t much difference between that group and the asthma patients not on GLP-1 drugs.

The researchers attributed this outcome to “large numbers of missing data” due to disruptions in information collection during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Though the data was limited, the study authors noted that the GLP-1 group shed an average of 7.7 pounds while the other group lost an average of 2 pounds. It’s unclear if the GLP-1 participants suffered side effects like nausea or vomiting.

The results were published recently in the journal Advances in Therapy.

This is not the first study to demonstrate that GLP-1 drugs can help asthma sufferers, particularly those with Type 2 diabetes and obesity.

Obesity is a well-known risk factor for asthma. One reason is that fat tissue can produce inflammatory substances that negatively affect the lungs and worsen asthma.

GLP-1 drugs often cause weight loss because they mimic the GLP-1 hormone the body naturally produces after eating. Appetite decreases as users feel fuller for longer. The meds are prescribed to people with obesity and/or Type 2 diabetes.

Snyder, medical director of the Bariatric Surgery Center at Rose Medical Center in Denver and in-house obesity specialist at FuturHealth, suggests that these drugs could be useful for asthmatics who aren’t obese or diabetic.

“These drugs appear to have anti-inflammatory effects, which is key since asthma is, at its core, an inflammatory disease,” Snyder said.

“They may also help calm airway hyperresponsiveness — in other words, making the lungs less reactive to common asthma triggers like allergens or pollution,” he added. “And of course, the weight loss many patients experience can also improve lung function and reduce asthma severity, so it’s likely a combination of these effects working together.”

Snyder said more research is needed to confirm the effects in people who are not obese.

Dr. Thomas Kilkenny, director of the Institute of Sleep Medicine, Pulmonary & Critical Care at Northwell’s Staten Island University Hospital, said the participants’ better breathing is simply due to the weight loss.

“It has been shown multiple times in the past, and various studies show that weight loss alone improves asthma control,” Kilkenny told MedicalNewsToday.

“This study did not comment on whether the GLP-1 medication had a direct effect on the physiology of asthma control,” he added.

Since the first GLP-1 drug was approved 20 years ago to treat Type 2 diabetes, researchers have suggested that these meds can also relieve knee osteoarthritis pain, calm skin conditions, lower the odds of heart troubles and reduce dementia risk.

“Conditions like asthma, diabetes, sleep apnea, dementia and even cardiovascular disease don’t exist in silos; they’re deeply interconnected,” Snyder said.

“The fact that GLP-1s may impact all of them suggests we’re entering a new era where the focus is not just on symptom management, but on rebalancing the underlying biology driving disease.”