Epilepsy Drug May Help Treat RP
This article was sent to me by Ziegler reader Danni. Thanks, Danni!
Results from a new study have found that the drug used to treat epileptic seizures called valproic acid, may halt or actually reverse vision loss caused by retinitis pigmentosa, a disease that affects countless people around the world. The team who discovered this possibility work at the University of Massachusetts Medical School in Worcester and are planning on conducting specific trials to confirm that this find is indeed true and not a fluke.
Retinitis pigmentosa affects roughly one in four thousand people and normally causes vision loss by age forty. RP is technically a group of diseases that causes degeneration of the retina and is linked to 40 gene groups, all of which cause different types of RP. Up until now, the only treatment for RP was to inundate the patient with vitamin A palmitate, which slows the progression of the disease, but is unable to stop it entirely.
All forms of RP are essentially processes of inflammation and cell death, both conditions that valproic acid is designed to fight against. During this preliminary study, they administered specific doses of the drug to seven patients who had RP over a time between two and six months. When the trial concluded, 5 of the patients experienced vast improvements in vision even though their RP had progressed to a point that is normally untreatable.
Now that the preliminary trial has proven to be promising, 2.1 million dollars are being put into a proper study to test the drug against a placebo and hopefully achieve a more concrete result with a larger pool of participants.
It never ceases to amaze me when drugs were created for one purpose but can actually have positive affects in other areas of medicine as well. It makes you wonder what other drugs could help with many other conditions but simply haven’t been tested yet. If nothing else, it seems that valproic acid may be the answer to eliminating RP and saving the vision of hundreds of thousands, if not millions of people.
To read the original article, please go to http://www.heraldnet.com/article/20100812/NEWS02/708129760/-1/headlines