Semaglutide users had nearly 40 percent fewer asthma attacks in a UK study

A drug best known for treating diabetes and driving weight loss may also be quietly helping the lungs. New research presented at a major European respiratory conference found that people taking semaglutide, the active ingredient in Ozempic and Wegovy, experienced markedly fewer asthma attacks than similar patients on a different diabetes medication. The finding adds asthma and chronic obstructive pulmonary disease to a growing list of conditions where GLP-1 drugs appear to have effects well beyond their original purpose.

The research was presented at the European Respiratory Society Congress in Barcelona by Dr. Bohee Lee and led by Professor Chloe Bloom, a clinical associate professor in respiratory epidemiology at the National Heart and Lung Institute at Imperial College London. Bloom’s team set out to answer a question that drug trials for GLP-1 medications had never directly examined: whether people with airway diseases who start these treatments end up having fewer acute respiratory attacks.

Four Parallel Studies Built From UK Health Records

To investigate, the researchers analyzed electronic medical records from the United Kingdom in four parallel studies, each covering between 20,000 and 22,000 people who had started either a GLP-1 medication or a sulfonylurea, an older class of diabetes drug used as the comparison group. Across those studies, people with asthma or chronic obstructive pulmonary disease who were prescribed GLP-1 therapies had fewer acute attacks than comparable patients who received the alternative diabetes medication. Among the GLP-1 drugs studied, semaglutide produced the clearest effect, particularly in people with asthma.

The Scale of the Reduction

Bloom reported that semaglutide use was linked to nearly a 40 percent reduction in asthma attacks and roughly a 20 percent reduction in flare-ups among patients with chronic obstructive pulmonary disease. Those figures place the finding among the more striking real-world associations to emerge from GLP-1 research this year, though Bloom was careful to frame it as encouraging rather than conclusive, noting that the study cannot establish that semaglutide directly caused the reduction rather than reflecting some other difference between the patient groups.

Why Researchers Are Cautious Despite the Numbers

Bloom emphasized that the results should not change how doctors or patients approach treatment right now. People with asthma or chronic obstructive pulmonary disease should not begin taking a GLP-1 receptor agonist specifically to treat their lung condition outside of current prescribing guidance, she said, since the study was built from observational health records rather than a randomized clinical trial designed to test cause and effect. Confirming whether semaglutide genuinely reduces respiratory attacks, rather than simply correlating with fewer of them, will require dedicated trials that track outcomes like attacks, lung function, and quality of life directly.

A Case for Treating Metabolic and Lung Health Together

Outside experts framed the findings as part of a broader pattern connecting metabolic health to airway disease. Dr. Alexander Mathioudakis, who chairs the European Respiratory Society’s group on airway pharmacology and treatment and was not involved in the research, said obesity and metabolic dysfunction are common among people with airway disease and are often under-addressed as contributing factors. He described the study as one of the largest real-world efforts so far to examine GLP-1 drugs and airway disease together, and one of the first to compare effects across individual drugs in the class rather than treating them as interchangeable. Mathioudakis argued the results strengthen the case for including respiratory measures, such as attack frequency and lung function, in future trials of metabolic drugs, so that any genuine lung benefit can be properly measured rather than inferred from records collected for other purposes.

A Biological Rationale Beyond Weight Loss

Bloom’s team did not start from nothing. GLP-1 receptor agonists, the drug class that includes semaglutide, are already known to be widely prescribed for type 2 diabetes and obesity, and earlier research had already suggested the drugs carry anti-inflammatory properties that could plausibly extend to the lungs, even though no prior trial had been designed to measure asthma or chronic obstructive pulmonary disease as a direct outcome. That gap in the evidence base is precisely what led the Imperial College London team to turn to real-world prescribing records rather than waiting for a purpose-built trial, since it allowed them to look for a signal in people who were already taking the drugs for unrelated reasons.

The four parallel study design was also a deliberate choice meant to guard against the possibility that a single analysis had simply turned up a statistical fluke. By repeating the comparison across four separate cohorts of 20,000 to 22,000 patients each, drawn from the same pool of UK electronic health records but analyzed as distinct groups, the researchers were checking whether the reduction in attacks held up consistently rather than appearing in only one subset of the data. The consistency of the semaglutide effect across those parallel analyses is part of why the finding drew attention at the Barcelona congress, even as the researchers themselves stopped short of calling it proof of a direct causal benefit.

This article was created with the assistance of AI and reviewed by an editor.

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