New use for an old drug: The potential of colchicine in CVD

Well, did your stroke hospital do ONE DAMN THING with this earlier research on colchicine? If not, what the fuck use is your stroke hospital? Who specifically are they waiting for to solve stroke? Call the president and ask when competent persons will be hired to put stroke research into protocols.

I bet they will incompetently DO NOTHING because it is easier to wait for SOMEONE ELSE TO SOLVE THE PROBLEM?    Fire them all.

• colchicine (4)

 

New use for an old drug: The potential of colchicine in CVD

Cardiology Today, January 2020

Secondary prevention of CVD with colchicine is a major focus for the cardiology community, especially after recent presentations of the COLCOT and COLCHICINE-PCI trials at the American Heart Association Scientific Sessions in November.
Repurposing of drugs for CV applications has become more common, as researchers have learned how the mechanisms of certain drugs may offer benefit for various conditions.

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“The revolution going on is trying to think about drugs that are traditionally used to treat rheumatoid arthritis can now actually be used to treat atherosclerosis. This repurposing process is really very interesting,” Paul M. Ridker, MD, MPH, FACC, FAHA, director of the Center for Cardiovascular Disease Prevention at Brigham and Women’s Hospital and Eugene Braunwald Professor of Medicine at Harvard Medical School, told Cardiology Today.

Binita Shah, MD, MS, from NYU Langone Health, said colchicine appears to reduce vascular inflammation, but more research is needed to determine optimal clinical use.

Source: NYU Langone Health. Reprinted with permission.

Colchicine, which has been investigated for CV applications for more than a decade, is a prominent example of this trend.
In the COLCOT trial, researchers found adults with a recent MI were less likely to experience an ischemic CV event over 2 years when assigned 0.5 mg per day of colchicine, an anti-inflammatory medication, compared with those assigned placebo. In addition, colchicine was associated with a 74% reduction in stroke risk and a 50% reduction in risk for angina hospitalization leading to revascularization. In the COLCHICINE-PCI trial, in patients with suspected ischemic heart disease or ACS referred for coronary angiography with possible PCI, acute preprocedural administration of 1.8 mg of colchicine did not reduce PCI-related myocardial injury or major adverse CV events compared with placebo. A secondary analysis showed attenuation of the inflammatory biomarker response.

Aruna D. Pradhan

“COLCOT demonstrated clinical efficacy of colchicine for cardiovascular risk reduction in patients with recent myocardial infarction,” Aruna D. Pradhan, MD, MPH, associate physician at Brigham and Women’s Hospital and assistant professor of medicine at Harvard Medical School, said during a discussant presentation at the AHA Scientific Sessions. “It was a large, simple and well-designed event-driven trial which aimed to answer one core question. This will be a landmark study. These results provide confirmation that inflammation management reduces cardiovascular risk, and it was an example of successful repurposing of a broadly available and relatively safe generic drug for a new application.”
In an interview with Cardiology Today, Jean-Claude Tardif, MD, director of research at the Montreal Heart Institute, principal investigator of COLCOT, said that “by repurposing well-known medications like colchicine, we can help address the major public health issue of subsequent CV events after an MI in a cost-effective manner, to help patients worldwide overcome the cost barriers of their treatment.”

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