A study presented this week at the European Respiratory Society Congress in Barcelona found that people taking semaglutide had nearly 40% fewer asthma attacks and about 20% fewer COPD flare-ups than a comparison group. Headlines ran with it fast — Ozempic and Wegovy’s active ingredient, now protecting your lungs.
The underlying research is genuinely interesting. It is also several steps short of what a headline like that implies. Here is what was actually presented, and why the gap between “associated with” and “treats” matters if you’re the one deciding whether to weigh it.
What was presented
Researchers from Imperial College London’s National Heart & Lung Institute, led by Dr. Chloe Bloom and presented by Dr. Bohee Lee, ran four parallel analyses of UK electronic medical records. Each analysis covered 20,000 to 22,000 adults with asthma or COPD who had also been prescribed a GLP-1 receptor agonist or a sulfonylurea — a different, older class of diabetes medication used here as the comparison group.
Among people who started semaglutide, the records showed roughly 40% fewer asthma attacks and roughly 20% fewer COPD exacerbations than among people who started a sulfonylurea instead. Other GLP-1 drugs were included in the analysis, but semaglutide showed the largest effect.
That’s a real, fairly large difference across four separate cohorts of meaningful size. It’s also, by the researchers’ own account, not close to a finished case.
What it does not establish
It’s a conference abstract, not a peer-reviewed paper. The findings were presented at a scientific congress, which is a normal and legitimate first step for research — but it means the data has not yet gone through the scrutiny of peer review or full publication. Details that would let other scientists probe the methodology and stress-test the numbers aren’t available yet.
It’s observational, so it can show a pattern without showing a cause. Nobody was randomly assigned to take semaglutide or a sulfonylurea. Clinicians made that choice for reasons the medical record doesn’t fully capture — how healthy a patient otherwise was, what else they were being treated for, how engaged they were with follow-up care. Any of those differences could produce a gap in outcomes that has nothing to do with the drug itself. Dr. Bloom said as much directly: the findings “should not change treatment decisions on their own,” and people “should not start GLP-1 receptor agonists specifically for their lung condition outside current prescribing guidance.”
The comparison drug matters. Sulfonylureas are older diabetes medications with their own side-effect profile, including weight gain in some patients. A chunk of the gap between the two groups could reflect people doing worse on a sulfonylurea rather than people doing dramatically better on semaglutide. The study can’t fully separate those two explanations from each other.
There’s an obvious, unexcluded mechanism sitting in plain sight: weight loss itself. Obesity is an independent driver of asthma severity — extra weight around the chest and abdomen restricts lung mechanics, and adipose tissue produces inflammatory signaling that can worsen airway disease. Semaglutide’s most well-established effect is weight loss. It’s entirely plausible that some or most of this respiratory benefit runs through that pathway rather than a novel anti-inflammatory action in the lungs, and the researchers themselves flagged anti-inflammatory effects as only a hypothesis, not a demonstrated mechanism. Untangling “lighter, therefore fewer attacks” from “some direct drug effect on lung tissue” is exactly the kind of question a randomized trial with respiratory outcomes as the actual target is built to answer — which is why researchers in the field, including pulmonologist Dr. Alexander Mathioudakis, are calling for one.
The part that applies to compounded medications specifically
Every patient in this analysis was taking a manufactured, branded GLP-1 product tracked through the UK’s health system. That’s a separate category from compounded semaglutide, which is what NoBsRx provides provider-guided access to: a preparation made by a state-licensed 503A pharmacy for an individual patient, not the FDA-approved branded product, and not the thing measured in this dataset or any trial like it.
Even once — if — this finding holds up under a randomized trial of the branded drug, that evidence wouldn’t automatically transfer to a compounded version. The active ingredient class may be the same; the regulatory evidence base is not. If a telehealth company markets a respiratory benefit for the compounded product they’re selling you based on a study like this one, they’re stretching a real finding past the population and product it actually covers.
Why this is still worth paying attention to
None of this means the finding is wrong or that it should be dismissed. Large, consistent effects across four separate cohorts are worth taking seriously as a signal for future research — that’s exactly how good hypotheses get generated. It’s also a useful reminder of how much of medicine is downstream of weight and metabolic health in ways that aren’t always obvious in advance.
But “worth studying further” and “proven” are different claims, and the distance between a conference poster and a clinical recommendation is measured in years and several more trials, not headlines. If you have asthma or COPD and you’re on a GLP-1 for an unrelated reason, that’s a conversation for the licensed provider managing your care — not a reason to start, stop, or change anything based on an article.
This post is general information, not medical advice. It does not describe a benefit of any NoBsRx program and it is not a claim that any medication treats asthma or COPD. Compounded medications are not FDA-approved. Treatment is never guaranteed — eligibility, diagnosis, and every treatment decision are made by independent licensed providers based on an individual clinical assessment, and availability varies by state. Do not start, stop, or change any treatment based on an article. If you have asthma or COPD, talk to a licensed clinician before making any changes to your care.