New Drugs for Gout and Ulcerative Colitis

New drugs for gout and ulcerative colitis, two kinds of disease that plague millions of people worldwide, have been found as results of studies reported in New England Journal of Medicine. In America only, about 3 million of people (mostly men) suffer from gout disease and 700.000 have ulcerative colitis.

The drugs for gout and ulcerative colitis are febuxostat and infliximab. Febuxostat will be the first new medicine for gout in the last four decades. While infliximab, popular with its generic name Remicade, is medicine for arthritis and Chron's disease but also shown to reduce the symptoms of ulcerative colitis.

Over a year, febuxostat was three times more effective at lowering urate to a healthy level. But the febuxostat patients had only slightly fewer gout attacks by the end.
"You need to be able to follow these patients, I believe, much longer" to see if febuxostat reduces gout attacks better, said lead researcher Dr. Michael Becker, a rheumatologist and professor at University of Chicago.

After about a year, about 20 percent of patients on Remicade and just 9 percent on a dummy medication had so few symptoms that they were taken off steroids, immune-suppressing drugs that have serious side effects and cannot be taken very long.

Gout is a form of arthritis, that is immensely a painful disease and mostly affects the joints. While ulcerative colitis is an inflammatory bowel disease, in which ulcers form in the surface lining of the colon and rectum.

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