The Diabetes Drugs That Can Cut Asthma Attacks By 70%

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Today’s 30-Second Summary

If you don’t have time to read the whole email today, here are some key takeaways:

• Asthma, obesity, and type 2 diabetes are closely linked, with the latter two greatly increasing asthma attack risk.

  • Today’s main feature looks at how, independent of various diabetes metrics, metformin and GLP-1 agonists give a 70% reduction in asthma attacks.

• Red light therapy is uncontroversially effective at improving many metrics of skin health (e.g. complexion, feeling, roughness, collagen intensity, and wrinkles); we’ve written about this before at 10almonds.

  • Today’s sponsor, Bon Charge, is offering a Black Friday discount on its red light therapy range, including their flagship red light therapy masks—if you were thinking of getting one, now’s the time before they run out!

• Today’s featured video has eye exercises you can do now for a temporary boost in eyesight, or every day for sustained improvements!

Read on to learn more about these things, or click here to visit our archive

A Word To The Wise

Watch and Learn

The Eye Exercises That Measurably Improve Vision

Sustained benefits require sustained practice, but you can also enjoy temporary benefits immediately 😎

See it for yourself now (and see it clearly!):

Prefer text? The above video will take you to a 10almonds page with a text-overview, as well as the video!

Wildcard Wednesday

The Diabetes Drugs That Can Cut Asthma Attacks By 70%

Asthma, obesity, and type 2 diabetes are closely linked, with the latter two greatly increasing asthma attack risk.

While bronchodilators / corticosteroids can have immediate adverse effects due to sympathetic nervous system activation, and lasting adverse effects due to the damage it does to metabolic health, diabetes drugs, on the other hand, can improve things with (for most people) fewer unwanted side effects.

Great! Which drugs?

Metformin, and glucagon-like peptide-1 receptor agonists (GLP-1RAs).

Specifically, researchers have found:

• Metformin is associated with a 30% reduction in asthma attacks

• GLP-1RAs are associated with a 40% reduction in asthma attacks

…and yes, they stack, making for a 70% reduction in the case of people taking both. Furthermore, the results are independent of weight, glycemic control, or asthma phenotype.

In terms of what was counted, the primary outcome was asthma attacks at 12-month follow-up, defined by oral corticosteroid use, emergency visits, hospitalizations, or death.

The effect of metformin on asthma attacks was not affected by BMI, HbA1c levels, eosinophil count, asthma severity, or sex.

Of the various extra antidiabetic drugs trialled in this study, only GLP-1 receptor agonists showed a further and sustained reduction in asthma attacks.

Here’s the study itself, hot off the press, published on Monday:

JAMA Int. Med. | Antidiabetic Medication and Asthma Attacks

“But what if I’m not diabetic?”

Good news:

More than half of all US adults are eligible for semaglutide therapy ← this is because they’ve expanded the things that semaglutide (the widely-used GLP-1 receptor agonist drug) can be prescribed for, now going beyond just diabetes and/or weight loss 😎

And metformin, of course, is more readily available than semaglutide, so by all means speak with your doctor/pharmacist about that, if it’s of interest to you.

Take care!

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This Or That?

Vote on Which is Healthier

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Now for today’s choice:

Click on whichever you think is better for you!

Bonus (Sponsored) Recommendation

About that Black Friday sale on the red light therapy kit—it’s been very popular, so you might want to grab yours now before they run out!

One-Minute Book Review

The Breathing Cure: Exercises to Develop New Breathing Habits for a Healthier, Happier and Longer Life – by Patrick McKeown

We’ve previously reviewed this author’s “The Oxygen Advantage”, which as you might guess from the title, was also about breathing. So, what’s different here?

While The Oxygen Advantage was mostly about improving good health with optimized breathing, and with an emphasis on sports too, The Breathing Cure is more about the two-way relationship between ill health and disordered breathing (and how to fix it).

Many kinds of illnesses can affect our breathing, and our breathing can affect many types of illness; McKeown covers a lot of these, including the obvious things like respiratory diseases (including COVID and Long COVID, as well as non-infectious respiratory conditions like asthma), but also things like diabetes and heart disease, as well as peri-disease things like chronic pain, and demi-disease things like periods and menopause.

In each case (and more), he examines what things make matters better or worse, and how to improve them.

While the style itself is just as pop-science as The Oxygen Advantage, this time it relies less on anecdote (though there are plenty of anecdotes too), and leans more heavily on a generous chapter-by-chapter scientific bibliography, with plenty of citations to back up claims.

Bottom line: if you’d like to breathe better, this book can help in very many ways.

Click here to check out The Breathing Cure, and breathe easy!

Penny For Your Thoughts?

Wishing you a wonderful Wednesday full of wellness,

The 10almonds Team