Acne Magazine

Doxycycline is actually thought to be able to prevent lung tissue damage before it even happens in patients with the lung disease, and is also used as a common treatment for urinary tract infection and sinus infections due to its antibiotic nature. The problem for people with lung tissue damaging diseases is that they suffer a shortage of a certain protein that protects the delicate tissue in the lungs, and this is what causes them to be so easily damaged when one has a disease that causes great trauma to it.

Researchers found that in animals with a reduced amount of this proteing benefitted by getting much less lung tissue damage when they were simultaneously given the antibiotic drug Doxycycline. They were especially impressed that the group who was given the acne antibiotic showed less damage than the group who was also receiving less of the protein, but no antibiotic.

While this is very promising news for this relatively simple multipurpose antibiotic of the tetracycline family, researchers are careful to note that it is not a “cure” for lung tissue damage and certainly not a cure for emphysema, and they have a long way to go before any treatment regimen would be developed, but that nonetheless it is a big development in helping patients with emphysema prevent lung tissue damage which further advances the degenerative lung disease.