Post hoc analysis of the Exenatide‐PD trial—Factors that predict response

Exenatide, a glucagon-like peptide-1 agonist and a licensed treatment for Type 2 diabetes significantly reduced deterioration in motor symptoms in patients with Parkinson's disease in a randomised, placebo-controlled trial. Additionally, there were trends favouring the exenatide group in assessments of non-motor symptoms, cognition and quality of life. The aim of this exploratory post-hoc analysis was to generate new hypotheses regarding (1) whether candidate baseline factors might predict the magnitude of response to exenatide and (2) whether the beneficial effects of exenatide reported for the overall population are consistent in various subgroups of patients. Univariate and multivariate analyses were conducted to determine possible predictors of motor response to exenatide in this cohort. Potential treatment by subgroup interactions for changes in; motor severity, non-motor symptoms, cognition and quality of life after 48-weeks treatment with exenatide were evaluated among post-hoc subgroups defined by age, motor phenotype, disease duration, disease severity, BMI and insulin resistance. In the subgroup analyses, exenatide once-weekly was associated with broadly improved outcome measures assessing motor severity, non-motor symptoms, cognition and quality of life across all subgroups, however tremor-dominant phenotype and lower MDS-UPDRS Part-2 scores predicted greatest motor response to exenatide and there was an indication that patients with older age of onset and disease duration over 10 years responded less well. While patients with a range of demographic and clinical factors can potentially benefit from exenatide once-weekly, these data support an emphasis towards recruiting patients at earlier disease in future planned clinical trials of GLP-1 receptor agonists in PD. This article is protected by copyright. All rights reserved