A MEDICATION commonly used to treat gout has been found by a Perth-based study to reduce the chance of a heart attack in some patients by up to 50 per cent.
Doctors from Perth's Sir Charles Gairdner Hospital will present their findings to the American Heart Association Scientific Sessions conference on Tuesday (Australian time), after a study of more than 500 coronary patients over several years.
The anti-inflammatory drug Colchicine has been used for years to reduce the swelling symptoms related to gout, the painful inflammatory arthritis often brought on by excessive food and alcohol.
But advancements in thinking around coronary disease, and the fact blocked arteries might become fatal because cholesterol cells become inflamed, prompted Dr Peter Thompson and his colleagues to take an "educated guess" about the potential of Colchicine.
"We have done a clinical trial with this drug and we have found that when you administer this on a steady, low-dose basis with people with coronary heart disease, you can actually halve heart attack risk," Dr Thompson told AAP from Los Angeles.
"So far it is only a smallish trial but it looks very exciting and interesting.
"We went to this one (Colchicine) knowing that it was a very likely candidate, and the results are very satisfying."
Delegates at the conference have already been raving about the study into the effectiveness of low-dose Colchicine - or LoDoCo as it has been dubbed - saying it could become one of the big breakthroughs in heart disease research this year.
Dr Thompson, from Sir Charles Gairdner's Heart Research Institute, ran the study along with colleagues Dr Mark Nidorf and Canada-based Dr John Eikelboom.
They will publish the full results of the study in the prestigious Journal of the American College of Cardiology later this month.
Dr Thompson says the study could be doubly significant because Colchicine is a low cost, readily available product already on the market, and would therefore not take years in development costs and trials.
"There are other drugs being developed to target particular pathways in the inflammatory process, but they are all going to be brand new drugs which take a long time to develop," Dr Thompson said.
"This is a widely available, relatively inexpensive, relatively innocuous drug that has been with us for generations - and this may end up being the one to go for."
Dr Nidorf, also based in Perth, ran much of the study via his own private practice without traditional funding, with the ethics of the study continually being checked by the hospital.
"That is quite a remarkable thing to be able to do," Dr Thompson said.
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