National Jewish Medical and Research Center. For a small percentage of persons, steroids will help decrease inflammation and cause a dramatic improvement. Your response to treatment is related to your ILD and the amount of inflammation present. The Introduction to the Monograph begins with the following two sentences. Currently available therapies are ineffective and associated with significant adverse effects.
Current therapies focus on suppressing the inflammatory process.
If medical therapy for IPF is going to improve over the next decade, controlled clinical trials will be needed to evaluate new drugs and treatment regimens. Interpretation of data on responsiveness to Corticosteroids therapy in earlier studies of IPF is difficult to evaluate because precise pathologic diagnoses were not established. Recent studies of well-defined patients with IPF suggest that few, if any, patients With IPF respond to Corticosteroid therapy. One study compared prednisone alone to prednisone plus colchicine and there was no additional benefit of colchicine. In another study, the effects of colchicine alone were similar to that of prednisone alone.