First-line thioguanine therapy effective in patients with thiopurine-naive IBD: Study
A recent study published in the journal of Inflammatory Bowel Diseases showed that first-line thioguanine treatment was clinically beneficial at 12 months with an acceptable safety profile in 53% of patients with thiopurine-naïve inflammatory bowel disease.
2 well-known maintenance medications for the treatment of Crohn's disease (CD) and ulcerative colitis (UC) are azathioprine and mercaptopurine. Even though they work well to keep patients in remission, up to 40% of patients must stop their treatment because of unfavorable side effects. Thioguanine has a less complex metabolism than azathioprine and mercaptopurine. It is directly transformed into the pharmacologically active 6-thioguaninucleotides (6-TGNs) by HGPRT (hypoxanthine-guanine phosphoribosyltransferase) without the production of potentially harmful metabolites like 6-MMP (6-methylmercaptopurine).
As of now, thioguanine is only utilized to treat inflammatory bowel disease in cases where azathioprine and/or mercaptopurine have failed. This research was to evaluate the safety, efficacy, and 12-month drug survival of thioguanine in patients with inflammatory bowel disease who had never taken thiopurine.
The patients with inflammatory bowel disease who had not taken thiopurine before and were receiving thioguanine as their first thiopurine derivative participated in this retrospective cohort study. The maintenance of thioguanine without the (re)initiation of concomitant biological treatment, systemic corticosteroids, or surgery was considered clinically successful. The Common Terminology Criteria for Adverse Events were used to categorize each adverse event.
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