For the first time, researchers have found drugs that can slow the decline of people with a fatal lung disease, idiopathic pulmonary fibrosis. Studies of two experimental drugs were published in the New England Journal of Medicine and presented on Sunday in San Diego at a meeting of the American Thoracic Society. The drugs did not make patients better, but definitely slowed the rate at which lung function got worse.
The odds of death increase as lung function decreases, so researchers hope that by stabilizing it, the drugs will prolong survival. But it is too soon to tell. The disease causes scarring of the lungs, making it harder and harder to breathe. At least 80,000 Americans have it. Half of patients die in three to five years.
So far, there had been no drugs that could do anything other than relieve symptoms like coughing. “There’s been nothing,” said Gary Hunninghake, the author of the editorial and a lung specialist at Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston. “That will now change.”
