Patients with lupus have a better chance of preventing kidney failure if they start taking one of two drugs which suppress the immune system, researchers reported Wednesday.
About 1.4 million Americans have lupus, a chronic disease in which the immune system can confuse healthy and foreign tissues and sometimes attacks both. Roughly 780,000 lupus sufferers have kidney disease.
Sandra Raymond, president of the Lupus Foundation of America, said patients have been desperate for better therapies with fewer side effects. “Patients are thrilled,” she told Reuters.
A study of 59 volunteers, published in this week’s New England Journal of Medicine, found that the conventional treatment -- injections of the drug cyclophosphamide -- prevented a relapse in 43 percent of the cases.
By comparison, one of the drugs found to be effective, azathioprine, worked about 57 percent of the time. The other drug, mycophenolate mofetil, was effective in about 77 percent of the volunteers.
Both drugs 'are good options'
The research team, led by Gabriel Contreras of the University of Miami, said there were not enough people in the study to determine whether mycophenolate mofetil, marketed as CellCept by Roche, was actually better than azathioprine, sold by several companies. Salix Pharmaceuticals Ltd. sells azathioprine under the name Azasan.
An editorial in the Journal said both drugs “are good options for maintenance therapy” in patients whose lupus was damaging their kidneys.
The two drugs tend to have fewer side effects than cyclophosphamide and can be given by mouth.
The Contreras team cautioned the study did not look at children or patients with mild forms of lupus-related kidney problems.
Raymond said she was particularly encouraged by the data for mycophenolate mofetil, which she said seemed to be the best for long-term treatment. But she said a larger study was needed to confirm the findings.
