
Drugs already taken by millions of diabetes patients appear to also help slash asthma attacks by up to 70%, new British research shows. The two drugs are metformin, one of the most widely used diabetes medications, and the GLP-1 class of medications that include Ozempic, Mounjaro and Saxenda. A study of nearly 13,000 people with diabetes and asthma found that metformin cut a patient’s odds for asthma attacks by 30%, while adding in a GLP-1 med reduced it by another 40%. The effects appeared to rely on more than just improved in blood sugar control or weight reduction, the authors said, and suggest that metformin and GLP-1s might work directly on airway function to ease asthma. All in all, the findings “suggest potential for repurposing anti-diabetic. drugs to much needed alternative treatments for asthma,” said a team led by Chloe Bloom. She’s a senior lecturer in respiratory epidemiology at Imperial College London. Her team published its findings Nov. 18 in JAMA Internal Medicine. As the researchers explained, there’s long been good reason to suspect that metformin might improve asthmatics’ respiratory health. The drug has anti-inflammatory effects, they said, and it also appears to reverse some of the changes in airways and the “hyper-responsiveness” of airways that asthma brings. The data on GLP-1s shows similar effects: The same cellular receptors that the drugs work on in… read on > read on >