A Double Blind Randomized Control Trial of Tadalafil in Interstitial Lung Disease of Scleroderma
Abstract
Systemic sclerosis (SSc, scleroderma) is a multisystem autoimmune rheumatic disease that causes inflammation, vascular damage and fibrosis. Besides involvement of skin, fibrosis also affects lung and heart. Although advances in understanding in pathophysiology and use of immunosuppressive therapy has brought significant improvement in outcome of other autoimmune diseases, scleroderma still remains as a disease with high mortality and 10 yr survival rate has improved only from 54% to 66% during last 25 years1. The frequency of deaths due to renal crisis significantly decreased (mainly due to effectiveness of ACE Inhibitors), from 42% to 6% of scleroderma-related deaths (p 0.001), whereas the proportion of patients with scleroderma who died of pulmonary fibrosis increased (due to lack of significant treatment) from 6% to 33% (p 0.001). However, presently, trials with immunosuppressive drugs including cyclophosphamide and other targeted molecules like Bosentan and Imatinib mesylate have shown very modest results at the best and given the risk of toxicity. The investigators have conducted three clinical trials with PDE5 inhibitor Tadalafil in the refractory Raynaud's phenomenon (RP) in SSc over last 3 years and had found good response in RP, healing of digital ulcers, prevention of new digital ulcers and also observed improvement in skin tightening, endothelial dysfunction and improvement of quality of life. The investigators therefore hypothesize that tadalafil may have an…
How strong is the evidence?
Evidence Hub reads this as a randomized trial, done in people. Its evidence level is 2 of 5 (High · randomized trial). Randomized trials of a reasonable size are the strongest single-study design. Reported size: 40 participants or records.
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