For people who wear a cumbersome mask to bed to avoid the life-threatening, long-term effects of a serious breathing disease, the prospect of shedding the headgear for a single pill taken at bedtime has been the stuff of dreams.
Now, those dreams appear likely to become reality for at least some people with obstructive sleep apnea (OSA), who stop breathing dozens or hundreds of times during the night, causing their blood oxygen to drop before they subconsciously awake. Top-line results from a large clinical trial, released this week, showed a combination of two medications in one pill stimulates muscles that keep the airway open, sharply decreasing breathing disruptions.
“It’s pretty clear that this medication combination is reducing obstructive sleep apnea events. And it’s reducing the severity of oxygen drops during sleep. That is exciting,” says Sigrid Veasey, a sleep physician and neuroscientist at the University of Pennsylvania who was not involved with the study. “The effects are robust and have a good scientific basis,” she says.
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However, physicians have questions about the drug that Apnimed’s press release didn’t address. For one, it’s unclear whether the drug affects patients’ actual symptoms, such as daytime sleepiness, says Najib Ayas, a sleep physician at the University of British Columbia who was the principal investigator at one of the sites in the current trial. “You want the patients to feel better with therapy, not only to have a reduction in [airway obstructing events],” he says.
