A study of the weight loss drug tirzepatide showed that people who took it had significantly lower blood pressure after 36 weeks of using the drug.
Tirzepatide, made by Eli Lilly, is used to treat type 2 diabetes, under the brand name Mounjaro, and to treat obesity, under the brand name Zepbound. It is the latest in a new class of weight-loss drugs, and its main competitor is semaglutide, made by Novo Nordisk and sold as Ozempic for diabetes and Wegovy for weight loss. For both drugs, researchers have evaluated whether they have additional effects beyond weight loss.
The blood pressure study, sponsored by Eli Lilly and published Monday in the journal Hypertension, was part of a larger effort to evaluate the effects of tirzepatide on weight loss. Researchers had already found that people who received the drug had lower blood pressure when measured at the doctor’s office. The new study applied a more stringent criterion: Did participants taking the drug have lower blood pressures when measured with a 24-hour monitor?
They did. Those taking the drug had systolic blood pressures — the pressure in the blood vessels when the heart contracts — that were 7.4 to 10.0 milligrams of mercury lower than those of participants taking a placebo. Systolic blood pressure is believed to be an accurate predictor of heart disease risk.
The reduction in blood pressure, said Dr. James de Lemos, a cardiologist at the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center and lead author of the study, is about what you would expect with a full dose of a blood pressure medication. Therefore, he said, the drug may be useful for people trying to control their blood pressure and reduce their risk of heart attack and stroke (although the study does not recommend replacing tirzepatide with other blood pressure drugs).
But, he noted, it was not possible to distinguish the effect—if any—the drug had on blood pressure from the known effect of weight loss on lowering blood pressure.
Dr. Benjamin Ansell, a blood pressure specialist at the University of California, Los Angeles, who was not involved in the study, said he did not find the result surprising.
“One could also hypothesize that weight loss allowed for more exercise or improved sleep/reduced sleep apnea, either of which could ‘additionally’ lower blood pressure,” he wrote in an email.
A more interesting result of a drug in this class, Dr. Ansell noted, is the recent discovery that semaglutide helps patients with a condition known as heart failure with preserved ejection fraction — a common outcome of obesity and high blood pressure. It is a chronic and progressive disease that is debilitating and destroys quality of life. Most patients with this type of heart failure are obese, and obesity is thought to contribute to the disease and its progression.
In a large study by Novo Nordisk, patients taking semaglutide had fewer disease symptoms and were better able to exercise, researchers found.
This result, added Dr. Ansell, “demonstrated a profound clinical significance in improving their function while reducing hospitalizations.”
And this finding adds to another result from Novo Nordisk showing that semaglutide reduced the risk of cardiac events such as heart attacks.
