New studies provide more data on effective or useless remedies for COVID-19, with strategies that yield reliable results.
British researchers published friday their studies on the only survival-enhancing drug: a reasonable steroid called dexamethasone. Two other studies have shown that hydroxychloroquine, an antimalarial medicine, does not affect others with mild symptoms.
For months before studies like these, learning what you’re helping or the night has been weakened through the “science of despair” as doctors and patients tried treatments or through a series of studies that are not strong enough to give transparent responses.
“For the picture to progress and patient outcomes to improve, fewer small or inconclusive studies” and more like the British, the Drs. Anthony Fauci and H. Clifford Lane of the National Institutes of Health wrote in the New England Journal OF Medicine.
Now is the time to do more studies comparing remedies and combinations of evidence, said Dr. Peter Bach, a fitness policy at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center in New York.
Here are the highlights of the advances in treatment:
Dexamethasone
The British study, led by the University of Oxford, tested a type of steroid widely used to tamp down inflammation, which can become severe and prove fatal in later stages of COVID-19.
About 2,104 patients given the drug were compared to 4,321 patients getting usual care.
Reduced the number of deaths in patients in poor health enough to require a breathing apparatus by 36%: 29% of the drug died compared to 41% of the same previous care. Reduced the death threat by 18% for patients who only needed an oxygen supplement: 23% of the drug died compared to 26% of the others.
However, it appears to be destructive in the early stages or in milder cases of disease: 18% of other people taking medications have died and 14% of those receiving normal care.
The clarity of who benefits and who will not “lead to many saved lives,” Fauci and Lane wrote.
Hydroxychloroquine
The same Oxford test also rigorously tested hydroxychloroquine and researchers in the past stated that it did not help patients hospitalized with COVID-19.
After 28 days, approximately 25.7% of hydroxychloroquine had died at 23.5% with the same previous care, a difference so small that it may have happened by chance.
Now, the main points published on a research site for scientists show that the drug would possibly have hurt. Patients who received hydroxychloroquine were less likely to leave the hospital alive within 28 days: 60% in treatment compared to 63% who received normal care. Those who did not want breathing apparatus at the beginning of the remedy were also more likely to take one or die.
Two other experiments showed that the early remedy with the drug did not help outpatients with mild COVID-19.
An examination of 293 other people in Spain published in the journal Clinical Infectious Diseases did not find a significant difference in reducing the number of patients inflamed with the virus, the threat of worsening and the need for hospitalization, or recovery time.
A similar examination by doctors at the University of Minnesota at Annals of Internal Medicine among 423 patients with mild COVID-19 found that hydroxychloroquine did not particularly decrease the severity of symptoms and produced more side effects.
“It’s time to move” to the treatment of patients with this drug, Dr. Neil Schluger of New York Medical College wrote in an observation in the journal.
REMDESIVIR
The only other remedy that has been shown to help patients with COVID-19 is remdesivir, an antiviral that shortens hospitalization by an average of about 4 days.
“The role of repobreza in serious COVID is now what we want to understand,” Bach of Memorial Sloan Kettering wrote in an email, saying that the drug should now be tested in combination with dexamethasone.
Details of the government’s review of remdesivir have still been published, but researchers are eager to see how many patients have gained other drugs, such as steroids and hydroxychloroquine.
Meanwhile, Gilead Sciences, the company that manufactures remdesivir, which is now administered intravenously, has begun testing an inhaled edition that would allow it to be tried in patients with COVID-19 less patients to verify that they prevent them from having health problems. want it Hospitalization. Gilead also began testing remdesivir in a small children’s organization.
Supplies are very limited and the U.S. government. He’s assigning doses to hospitals until September.