Impotence drug aids treatment of rare lung disease: study

A combination treatment using the erectile dysfunction drug Cialis may greatly reduce death and hospitalization from an incurable lung disease that mainly affects women, a new clinical trial shows.

Cialis combined with a blood pressure medication called ambrisentan (Letairis) significantly reduced the progression of pulmonary arterial hypertension, according to results published in the Aug. 27 issue of the New England Journal of Medicine. The condition involves high blood pressure in the arteries leading into the lungs.

People who took the combination therapy were half as likely to die, require hospitalization or have severe progression of their illness, when compared with people who only received one of the two drugs, researchers found.

The results are so encouraging that the maker of Cialis, GlaxoSmithKline, has submitted them to the U.S. Food and Drug Administration so this combination use can be added to the drug’s label, said senior study author Dr. Lewis Rubin, an emeritus professor of medicine at the University of California, San Diego School of Medicine.

Dr. Carl Pepine, past president of the American College of Cardiology, said the results “offer an easy-to-use additional treatment for patients who have this unfortunate condition, who are largely women.”

The two drugs work in different ways to ease the effects of pulmonary arterial hypertension, so researchers decided to see if their impact would be greater used in tandem, Rubin explained.

“This is a complex disease. There’s no magic bullet,” Rubin said. “We postulated that the more pathways you target, the better the effect would be.”

Pulmonary arterial hypertension causes people to be chronically short of breath, as their blood has difficulty getting through the lungs to pick up oxygen. It eventually leads to heart failure because the heart has to pump harder to keep blood circulating through the body.

Pulmonary arterial hypertension is relatively rare, Rubin said, affecting about 50,000 people in the United States. Average survival is roughly two years following diagnosis.

Cialis works by blocking PDE5, an enzyme that breaks down a substance called nitric oxide that promotes dilation of blood vessels. With more nitric oxide available, the arteries feeding the lungs are better able to dilate, increasing blood flow.

Rubin said Cialis’ sister medication Viagra also has the same effect, but is not as longlasting.

Both Cialis and ambrisentan are FDA-approved for pulmonary arterial hypertension. But ambrisentan works by inhibiting endothelin, a substance that causes blood vessels to constrict, he said. Thus, one drug promotes dilation of blood vessels while the other works to prevent constriction.

Researchers recruited 500 people with pulmonary arterial hypertension to take part in the clinical trial. The study involved 120 medical centers in 14 countries, and ran between October 2010 and July 2014.

About half of the participants received both drugs, while onequarter received Cialis alone and another quarter received ambrisentan alone.

Only about 18 percent of people on combination therapy died or experienced severe progression of pulmonary arterial hypertension, compared with 31 percent of people taking either ambrisentan or Cialis alone.

And it appeared that using the two drugs together produced no additional side effects, Rubin and Pepine said.