Research

Hormonal

Pitolisant (5-20 mg/day) significantly reduces self-reported excessive daytime sleepiness and fatigue in patients with moderate-to-severe obstructive sleep apnea who refuse or are non-adherent to CPAP therapy, without improving objective maintenance of wakefulness.

If you have moderate to severe sleep apnea but cannot or will not use CPAP, pitolisant (5-20mg daily) can significantly reduce your daytime sleepiness and fatigue. It does not fix the breathing pauses or objectively improve your ability to stay awake in a lab test, but it does make you feel less sleepy and improves your quality of life. It is generally safe with side effects similar to placebo.

GoodSupportsHIGH confidence
Pitolisant significantly reduced self-reported daytime sleepiness and fatigue and improved patient-reported outcomes and physician disease severity assessment in sleepy patients with obstructive sleep apnea refusing or nonadherent to continuous positive airway pressure.
Yves Dauvilliers et al. · American Journal of Respiratory and Critical Care Medicine · 2020

Why this rating

Randomized, double-blind, placebo-controlled trial with a large sample size (N=268) and rigorous statistical analysis, though limited to a specific population.

Source

Pitolisant for Daytime Sleepiness in Patients with Obstructive Sleep Apnea Who Refuse Continuous Positive Airway Pressure Treatment. A Randomized Trial

Yves Dauvilliers et al. · American Journal of Respiratory and Critical Care Medicine · 2020

DOI 10.1164/rccm.201907-1284oc

rct · n=268Cited 265×
Read the paper
DOI resolved against Crossref · corpus check 2026-06-10

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