Eli Lilly’s drug tirzepatide, sold under the names Mounjaro for diabetes and Zepbound for weight loss, improved symptoms in heart failure patients with obesity, the company said Thursday.
The findings add to a growing body of evidence that the GLP-1 drugs, which also include Novo Nordisk’s Ozempic and Wegovy, have benefits beyond diabetes and weight loss.
In Lilly’s latest trial, patients who got tirzepatide were 38% less likely to be hospitalized, need to increase their heart failure medication or die because of heart complications, compared to people who got a placebo. Patients who got the drug also reported less shortness of breath, fatigue and swelling of the lower legs. The trial lasted 52 weeks.
Lilly released its findings in a news release; the results have not been published in a medical journal or reviewed by outside scientists.
“I think it’s quite impressive,” said Dr. Patricia Pellikka, the Betty Knight Scripps professor of cardiovascular disease clinical research at the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota. “For a long time, we’ve had rather limited therapies for these patients. It should be a very welcome tool for the toolbox for patients.” Pellikka was not involved with Lilly’s research.
About 6.7 million adults in the U.S. have heart failure, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and in 2022, it was responsible for nearly 14% of deaths.
“These drugs, while affording weight loss, have shown to improve symptoms of heart failure, and that has been sort of revolutionary in our field,” Dr. Anu Lala, an advanced heart failure and transplant cardiologist at Mount Sinai Fuster Heart Hospital in New York City, said of patients with heart failure. “It’s improved the symptoms of heart failure. It improves the functional capacity of what these patients are now able to do. It improves their quality of life.”
Lala said she is already using the medications with her own patients.
“These individuals are just markedly short of breath,” said Lala, who was not involved with the research. She has advised Novo Nordisk but not Lilly.
The Lilly study looked at people with heart failure with preserved ejection fraction, which affects as many as half of heart failure patients. In that type of condition, the walls of the heart stiffen, making it more difficult for the heart to fill with blood and then pump enough blood to the body.
About 60% of patients with that type of heart failure also have obesity, said Dr. Jeff Emmick, senior vice president of product development at Lilly.
It is still unclear why the drug helped heart failure patients, though Emmick hypothesized that it might be linked to a reduction in fat that can build up around the heart.
“We’ll be looking to see whether there’s a reduction in epicardial fat,” he said. He also pointed to certain markers of inflammation that medications like tirzepatide have been shown to decrease.
In April, Lilly announced results finding that tirzepatide had been found to reduce sleep apnea in adults with obesity. The Food and Drug Administration this year expanded the approval for Novo Nordisk’s Wegovy to reduce heart disease risk. Novo Nordisk has also shown that semaglutide, the ingredient in both Wegovy and Ozempic, can cut the risk of kidney disease complications.
