A 79-year-old patient with obesity, sleep apnea, and pulmonary hypertension received the experimental drug retatrutide from Eli Lilly in April 2026 under a compassionate use program. Retatrutide is not yet approved by federal drug regulators.

Pulmonary hypertension is high blood pressure in the blood vessels of the lungs, a condition that causes the heart to work harder to pump blood to the lungs. "Pulmonary hypertension is nothing more than elevated blood pressure in the blood vessels of the lungs," said Paul Forfia, Director of the Emory Healthcare Pulmonary Hypertension, Right Heart Failure and CTEPH Program. Forfia added, "When a person is sufficiently obese, they literally can't properly breathe, get oxygen into their bloodstream, get carbon dioxide out of their bloodstream."

GLP-1 drugs, the class to which retatrutide belongs, were initially developed to treat type 2 diabetes. Vallerie McLaughlin, Director of the pulmonary hypertension program at the University of Michigan, said, "I think because the GLP-1s can help with inflammation and stress on the heart from obesity and metabolic syndrome, they may be helpful in pulmonary hypertension due to any cause, but especially in patients who have pulmonary hypertension due to heart failure with preserved ejection fraction, where they have been well studied." In heart failure with preserved ejection fraction, the heart pumps normally but is too stiff to fill properly. GLP-1s have been shown to lower the risk of complications and improve symptoms in people with this condition. Retatrutide has demonstrated bariatric-surgery levels of weight loss.

A September 2025 preprint from a Vanderbilt University team published on medRxiv found an association between GLP-1 use and lower risk of pulmonary hypertension in a large, retrospective study of U.S. veterans with type 2 diabetes. A May 2025 review in the American Heart Journal Plus: Cardiology Research and Practice called for prospective trials to confirm a link between GLP-1s and pulmonary hypertension risk. McLaughlin commented on the specific patient case, saying, "I don't know the details of that case, but because there are so many different things that can cause pulmonary hypertension, it may have contributed to some of those underlying causes."