14 DAY TRIAL // People suffering from lupus nephritis benefit from much better treatments today, than they did ten years ago, concluded a new review carried out by Columbia University College of Physicians and Surgeons.
Lupus nephritis is an inflammatory kidney disorder that is caused by the autoimmune disease systemic lupus erythematosus (SLE), but researchers have been working of different therapies for this condition for the past years and their advancements improve the patients' lives, significantly.
All the research concerning this disorder, carried out over the past 10 years, has been reviewed by Gerald Appel, MD and Andrew Bomback, MD, from Columbia University College of Physicians and Surgeons, and they concluded that there have been remarkable improvements.
Today, patients suffering from the disease can have nearly normal lives, and no longer experience the side effects that treatments caused in the past.
The new therapies use lower doses and tend to shorten the duration of intravenous cyclophosphamide treatments, which causes less treatment-related side effects in patients, without affected the efficiency of the therapy.
Also, in some cases of lupus nephritis, the highly toxic immunosuppressive drug is being replaced by the less harmful agent called mycophenolate mofeti.
New treatments tend to combine several agents, which is actually a method that has greater benefits than single drugs do, for many patients.
Another advantage of new therapies is targeting specific components of the immune system, like rituximab does: this antibody consumes B cells, and can trigger remissions in some patients with severe lupus nephritis, even if their bodies do not respond to cyclophosphamide or mycophenolate mofetil.
Ocrelizumab and belimumab are other targeted agents that also act on B cells, as for abatacept, it proved its efficiency in blocking T cell activation.
And once the patient is in remission, relapses are prevented by administrating mycophenolate mofetil and azathioprine.
After all these achievements, in the future patients can hope to benefit from the current clinical trials, because the “treatment of lupus nephritis is rapidly changing, becoming safer and more effective,” according to Dr. Appel.
The authors write that “the treatment of lupus nephritis today is markedly different, and objectively more effective, than it was 10 years ago.
“The hope and expectation is that a similar claim will be made 10 years hence.”
Lupus is a chronic systemic autoimmune disease that can cause inflammation and tissue damage to any part of the body.
The disease affects nearly 1.4 million persons in the US, especially women aged 20 to 40 years, and it can lead to kidney failure.
This review will appear in an upcoming issue of the Journal of the American Society Nephrology (JASN).