Lung function in idiopathic pulmonary fibrosis - explorative analyses of the IFIGENIA trial

Background: The randomized placebo-controlled IFIGENIA-trial demonstrated that therapy with high-dose N-acetylcysteine (NAC) given for one year, added to prednisone and azathioprine, significantly ameliorates (i.e. slows down) disease progression in terms of vital capacity (VC) (+9%) and diffusing capacity (DLco) (+24%) in idiopathic pulmonary fibrosis (IPF). To better understand the clinical implications of these findings we performed additional, explorative analyses of the IFGENIA data set. Methods: We analysed effects of NAC on VC, DLco, a composite physiologic index (CPI), and mortality in the 155 study-patients. Published: 27 October 2009 Respiratory Research 2009, 10:101 doi:10.1186/1465-9921-10-101 Received: 12 June 2009 Accepted: 27 October 2009 This article is available from: http://respiratory-research.com/content/10/1/101 © 2009 Behr et al; licensee BioMed Central Ltd. This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

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