[ad_1]
Thousands of coronavirus patients in Britain will receive aspirin as part of a trial to determine whether the pain reliever can reduce the risk of dangerous blood clots.
The cheap and widely available drug has been added to a list of potential treatments to be tested as part of the Covid-19 therapy (recovery) randomization trial, one of the largest in Britain.
People infected with coronavirus appear to have hyperreactive platelets, the cell fragments that help stop bleeding, meaning they are at increased risk of life-threatening blood clots, scientists say.
Experts hope that aspirin, an antiplatelet agent commonly used as a blood thinner, may reduce the chance of clotting complications.
“Aspirin is widely used to prevent blood clots in many other conditions, such as heart attacks, strokes, and pre-eclampsia in pregnant women,” said Professor Martin Landray, co-lead investigator of the trial.
“But enrolling patients in a randomized trial like Recovery is the only way to assess whether there are clear benefits for Covid-19 patients and whether those benefits outweigh any potential side effects, such as the risk of bleeding.”
At least 2,000 patients are expected to receive 150 mg of aspirin per day along with the usual regimen. Data from those patients will be compared to at least 2,000 other patients receiving standard Covid-19 treatment alone.
Small daily doses of aspirin have been found to reduce the risk of certain cancers. As a blood thinner, it increases the risk of internal bleeding, and taking too much over a long period of time has been associated with kidney damage.
Other treatments being tested in the Recovery trial include antibody-rich plasma collected from recovered Covid-19 patients and Regeneron’s antibody cocktail that was used to treat Donald Trump’s Covid-19 symptoms.
The decision to add aspirin to this list was made by the Oxford University researchers who led the trial and England’s chief medical officer, Professor Chris Whitty, following a recommendation from the UK’s Covid-19 Therapeutics Advisory Panel.
Unlike Gilead’s remdesivir, which has been approved as a treatment for Covid-19 in the US but has shown poor results in a large World Health Organization trial, aspirin is a generic drug, which makes it makes it much cheaper.
The Recovery trial was the first to show that dexamethasone, a steroid that is also cheap and widely available, could save the lives of people seriously ill with Covid-19. It also showed that the antimalarial drug hydroxychloroquine, once touted by Trump as a cure, was not beneficial for treating Covid-19 patients.
