Potential Avenues for Combination Therapy in Obstructive Sleep Apnea: Danny Eckert, PhD

WATCH TIME: 6 minutes

"We’ve reached a point where we can target the root causes of OSA. With combination therapies—oral appliances, positional therapy, and even emerging drugs—we’re seeing that many patients may no longer need CPAP at all."

Obstructive sleep apnea (OSA) is one of the most common sleep-related breathing disorders, affecting nearly 30 million adults in the United States, with several others remaining undiagnosed. The first line of treatment has always been positive airway pressure (PAP), a traditional method that keeps airways open by delivering constant air pressure. While PAP is quite common, adherence remains an issue for some patients, which has led to greater conversation around different ways to treat OSA, including the idea of combination approaches.

At the recently concluded 2025 SLEEP Annual Meeting, held June 8-11, in Seattle, Washington, sleep expert Danny Eckert, PhD, gave a talk on the promise of pharmacotherapy for OSA. The presentation was centered around the some of the latest developments in the OSA therapeutic field, including the emergence of GLP-1 agonists like tirzepatide, and the emerging class of agents that focus on treating the underlying roots of the disorder.

Eckert, director of sleep health at Flinders University, in Adelaide, Australia, sat down with NeurologyLive^® during the meeting to discuss the potential of precision and combination pharmacotherapy for OSA. In the discussion, Eckert spoke on how identifying and targeting distinct non-anatomical traits–like poor muscle responsiveness, high loop gain, low arousal threshold, and airway collapsibility–can guide more personalized and effective treatment. Furthermore, he talked about the potential of noradrenergic/antimuscarinic drug combinations, nasal reflex modulators, and oral appliances paired with positional therapy.

Click here for more SLEEP 2025 coverage.