This question came about as my wife has just started a course of steroids to treat her Crohn’s Disease. They work amazingly well, amazingly quickly… But they are only a temporary solution as they have a range of significant side effects such as thinning of the bones, insomnia, etc…
Steroids are “old” in medical terms – why haven’t we managed to remove the side effects yet?
In: Chemistry
It’s a good question. Ultimately many medications we use have many different mechanisms in our body and it’s very hard to solely isolate one use case from all the rest. For example baby aspirin is used to help heart disease because it is a platelet inhibitor, but as an NSAID it can also be anti inflammatory for fevers, and analgesic for pain. But take too much of it and it can cause stomach ulcers because it thins the mucus lining of your gut. Also lots of meds are discovered by accident frankly. Warfarin was a rat poison before it was used for blood thinning in afib and heart valve replacements. Nowadays things are getting more narrowed down- chemotherapy in its early form was basically straight up poison for the body whereas now we have things like immunotherapy that specifically target various immune cells in the body.
Edit: it’s the same thing with Crohn’s disease which you mentioned in your post. Steroids work amazingly well and in flares they are still the first line of defense we have. There are immunotherapies and immune modulators that are used in IBD now too. But even that is not a perfect science since they are essentially immune suppressants. Hopefully in the future things continue to advance even more!
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