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
In some cases the drugs can actually be modified to reduce side effects. A common example is the allergy medicine Xyzal, which is a newer version of the medicine Zyrtec, but they managed to get rid of the drowsiness effect that Zyrtec had. Another one would be Imodium, which is similar to morphine and binds to opioid receptors in the gut and brain, just not so much the ones that make you high. So in some cases it’s the structure of the drug itself that is able to be changed to cause less of a side effect, other times it can be changed to be more specific in the receptors it targets. But someone smarter than me may be able to explain why steroids seem to be so hard to reduce side effects.
Latest Answers