Metformin reverses established lung fibrosis

[Northerner]

Researchers at the University of Alabama at Birmingham have shown -- for the first time -- that established lung fibrosis can be reversed using a drug treatment that targets cell metabolism.

This novel finding, reported in the journal Nature Medicine, is important because, despite significant advances to reveal the pathological mechanisms of persistent fibrosis, effective treatment interventions are lacking.

Pulmonary fibrosis can develop after lung injuries like infections, radiation or chemotherapy, or it can have an unknown cause, as in idiopathic pulmonary fibrosis, or IPF. IPF is a progressive, and ultimately fatal, lung disorder that strikes more than 150,000 patients a year in the United States and more than 5 million worldwide.

https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2018/07/180703131423.htm

It's that wonder drug again! 🙂

 

[mikeyB]

It’s mice again.

Here we have the commonly prescribed drug Metformin, against a not very common health condition. You don’t need a degree in statistics to show that if this really worked in humans, it would have been found serendipitously by now.

It may work, of course, with bucket sized doses of Metformin, but you would need a bigger bucket to cope with side effects.