• Email Us: [email protected]
  • Contact Us: +1 718 874 1545
  • Skip to main content
  • Skip to primary sidebar

Medical Market Report

  • Home
  • All Reports
  • About Us
  • Contact Us

Promising Treatment For Sleep Apnea Opens Up New Therapeutic Possibilities

October 7, 2022 by Deborah Bloomfield

The human body is a mind-bogglingly amazing thing… most of the time. Like any piece of kit, it has a few glitches: there’s that area in the middle-distance that our eyes just blank on, leaving our brains to try to fill it in with a best guess; our backs, and ankles, which were never fit for purpose if we’re honest; and let’s not even start on the whole mess that is the genitals.

But none of those are as immediately problematic as sleep apnea, a condition where your body occasionally just stops breathing while you snooze. 

Advertisement

“Obstructive sleep apnea can be a debilitating disease, causing poor quality sleep at night and sleepiness during the day,” explained Dr Thomas Altree, a sleep clinician from Flinders Health and Medical Research Institute: Sleep Health, in a statement. “It affects millions… and causes major impacts on health and productivity.”

Those “major impacts” can be everything from mood swings and headaches to a dramatically increased risk of fatal heart attacks and strokes – which makes finding treatments for this deceptively common condition quite a priority. But now, thanks to a new study by Altree and his colleagues, a whole new avenue of drug therapies may be about to open up.

“Recent research found a combination of the medicines reboxetine and oxybutynin, which were both previously used for unrelated conditions, could be an effective treatment for obstructive sleep apnea,” Altree said. 

Advertisement

But that combination came with side effects: oxybutynin is what’s known as an antimuscarinic drug, traditionally used to treat overactive bladder conditions, and while clinical trials did indeed show a reduction in sleep apnea events, they also showed a reduction in things like being able to pee or have sex.

So, with their new study, the researchers switched the recipe up a little. “We wanted to see if reboxetine on its own could be effective,” Altree explained, “and assess exactly how it changes breathing during sleep.”

The team, along with collaborators at the Woolcock Institute of Medical Research in Sydney, recruited 16 obstructive sleep apnea patients to test the drug. That’s not a huge sample size, but the study itself – a double-blind, placebo-controlled, randomized trial, testing single doses of reboxetine compared to a combination of reboxetine and oxybutynin or a placebo – is pretty much the gold standard for clinical trials, making the results potentially important additions to the literature.

Advertisement

But what were those results? Well, it turns out the team’s hunch was correct: “Our results showed that reboxetine on its own can reduce sleep apnea severity,” Altree said. “We found the drug reduced the number of sleep apnea events per hour and also improved oxygen levels, while the addition of oxybutynin didn’t cause additional improvements.”

It’s great news: reboxetine, previously used as an antidepressant, could be used on its own as a treatment for sleep apnea. It’s a development that could improve millions of lives – not to mention provide insight into the role of this specific type of treatment on upper airway stability. 

But we know what you’re thinking – we promised you a paradigm shift, not just a fine-tuning of an existing therapy. Well, here’s the extra-cool bit. Sleep apnea, currently, is one of those conditions where we’ve found a ton of individual causes but only really one or two treatments. And that’s a problem.

Advertisement

“The current gold-standard treatment of sleep apnea is with a CPAP device during sleep,” Altree pointed out. “But this one-size-fits-all approach doesn’t address the fact that there are different causes for sleep apnea. In addition, many people can’t tolerate CPAP in the long term.”

But during their study, the team took the opportunity to delve a little deeper – measuring not just whether the therapy was working, but also why. “We… used a state-of-the-art computing method to determine how the drug stabilizes breathing during sleep,” Altree explained, “which allows us to identify which patients might benefit most from the drug in the future.”

Thanks to cutting-edge technology, the team were able to not just find a treatment for sleep apnea, but also to figure out who that treatment would work best for. For millions of obstructive sleep apnoea patients around the globe, that might just be a game-changing development: the first step towards the development of drug-based treatments that remove the need for intrusive and uncomfortable tools like CPAP machines.

Advertisement

“It’s… important we discover other avenues to assist people,” Altree said, “and this study provides an important step for future drug development.”

The study is published in the Journal of Clinical Sleep Medicine.

Deborah Bloomfield
Deborah Bloomfield

Related posts:

  1. Tennis-Canadian teen Fernandez pulls off another upset to reach U.S. Open final
  2. Twitter accelerates again with Bitcoin tips, NFTs, recorded Spaces, creator fund and more
  3. Lamborghini Huracán STO: A final celebration before electrification
  4. Google to invest $1 billion in Africa over five years

Source Link: Promising Treatment For Sleep Apnea Opens Up New Therapeutic Possibilities

Filed Under: News

Primary Sidebar

  • New Study Unearths Humanity’s “Hidden” Crossings Out Of Africa
  • Trichonephila Clavipes: The Spider That Spins “Golden” Silk
  • The Southern Delta Aquariids And Alpha Capricornids Meteor Showers Will Dazzle The Skies Together Soon
  • Virus Found In Black-Eyed Pea Plants Could Be Used To Treat Cancer
  • Many People Have No Idea Where Oil Actually Comes From. It’s Not Dinosaurs
  • “World’s Rarest Elephant”: Meet Motty, The Only Known Elephant Hybrid
  • Missing 40 Percent Of Matter In The Universe Finally Discovered, Could We Be On Track For A Universal Cancer Vaccine, And Much More This Week
  • Solar Power Producing Heliostats Could Get A “Night Job” Finding Asteroids
  • COVID-19 Can Lead To Build Up Of Alzheimer’s-Linked Protein Clumps In Eyes And Brain
  • The Wild Life Of Snowflake, The Only Albino Gorilla Ever Known
  • Stunning Drone Footage Reveals Largest Turtle Nesting Site In The World, Containing 41,000 Females
  • New “Different Form” Of Type 1 Diabetes Found In Sub-Saharan African And Black American Patients
  • Neanderthals May Have Feasted On Maggots, Which They Harvested From Rotting Flesh
  • Common Cannabis Substitute May Be Far More Psychoactive Than Previously Thought
  • This Is The Most Bizarre International Border In The World
  • Earth Will Not Fall Into Darkness Next Week – But There Is An “Eclipse Of The Century” In 2027
  • 850,000-Year-Old Remains Suggest Prehistoric Child Was Decapitated And Eaten By Its Own Kind
  • How To Watch The ISS As It Crosses The US Night Sky In The Next Few Days
  • “Robo-Bunnies” Are Florida’s Newest Weapon Against Python Invaders
  • Are We About To Get The First-Ever Negative Leap Second?
  • Business
  • Health
  • News
  • Science
  • Technology
  • +1 718 874 1545
  • +91 78878 22626
  • [email protected]
Office Address
Prudour Pvt. Ltd. 420 Lexington Avenue Suite 300 New York City, NY 10170.

Powered by Prudour Network

Copyrights © 2025 · Medical Market Report. All Rights Reserved.

Go to mobile version