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Friday, April 22, 2011

New Hope for Patients of Diabetic Nephropathy

Posted by Dr Prahallad Panda on 11:05 AM Comments

ADMA may play a role in certain forms of kidne...
There is new Hope for patients of Diabetic Nephropathy, it seems. Many suffer from end stage kidney disease, most commonly as a late complication of diabetes mellitus.
They either have to have kidney transplant, which is difficult because of limited donors availability; or live on life long dialysis, commonly peritoneal.
In a new research , at the University of California, San Diego School of Medicine, the National Institutes of Health (NIH) and the Mayo Clinic have published promising results of a clinical study using an experimental anti-fibrotic and anti-inflammatory drug called pirfenidone to treat patients with diabetic nephropathy.
The lead author Kumar Sharma, MD, FAHA, professor of medicine in the UCSD division of nephrology and director of the Center for Renal Translational Medicine; says the drug not only halted the progression of the end stage diabetic nephropathy, but also improved the function of the kidneys.
Pirfenidone is an experimental drug first introduced for Idiopathic Pulmonary Fibrosis, but the FDA declined to give approval to it in 2010. But the European Commission has given its approval in March, 2011.
This is basically an antifibolytic and anti-inflammatory drug that has the power to block the action of Transforming Growth Factor beta that is responsible for fibrosis in kidney following constant onslaught of excess glucose available in the circulation.
A new randomized, double-blind study of 77 patients with diabetic nephropathy that was conducted at Thomas Jefferson Hospital in Philadelphia, the Mayo Clinic in Rochester and the NIH; revealed that the function of kidneys improved as evidenced by the estimated glomerular filtration rate, or eGFR, with a dose as low as 1200 mg/day.
It is still to be approved for the treatment of nephropathy but shows definite promise in a field where very little medications are available. Sharma states the next step is to perform a larger clinical study and to identify personalized biomarkers, to determine which patients are most apt to show improvement on the drug
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