Science / Medicine : Caution Urged in Heart Drug

A powerful immunosuppressive drug should not routinely be used to treat a deadly disease of the heart muscle because the drug has many side effects and its benefits may be short-lived, researchers said in a new study.

The drug, prednisone, is an anti-inflammatory agent that suppresses the immune system. It is used to treat a variety of diseases in which the body’s immune system attacks itself, including lupus and rheumatoid arthritis.

Researchers from the National Institutes of Health studied the effects of high doses of prednisone on 102 patients with idiopathic dilated cardiomyopathy, the medical name for an enlarged heart muscle that is weakened due to a disease of the muscle itself.

Medical textbooks suggest that prednisone should be tried as a treatment if other therapies do not work, said Joseph Parrillo, who led the study while he was a researcher at the National Institutes of Health. Parrillo said the drug produced a “modest improvement in heart function” after three months of daily therapy in patients with inflamed heart muscle, but it had many side effects and its long-term effects were unknown.

The side effects included a weight gain of at least 11 pounds in some patients, hyperglycemia, pneumonia and osteoporosis.