A team at the Henry Ford Health System in Southeast Michigan said Thursday that their study of 2,541 hospitalized patients found that those who received hydroxychloroquine were much less likely to die.
Dr. Marcus Zervos, chief infectious disease division for the Henry Ford Health System, said 26% of those who did not receive hydroxychloroquine died, compared to 13% of those who received the drug. The team looked at all treated in the hospital system from the first patient in March.
It is a surprising finding because several other studies have found no benefit from hydroxychloroquine, a medication originally developed to treat and prevent malaria. President Donald Trump heavily promoted the drug, but later studies found that patients not only did not improve if they received the drug, but were more likely to experience cardiac side effects.
The US Food and Drug Administration withdrew its emergency use authorization for the drug earlier this month, and trials worldwide, including trials sponsored by the World Health Organization and Institutes, were suspended. National Health.
“Our results differ from other studies,” said Zervos at a press conference. “What we think was important in ours … is that patients were treated early. For hydroxychloroquine to have a benefit, it must start before patients begin to experience some of the serious immune reactions that patients may have with Covid. ” additional.
Henry Ford’s team also carefully monitored patients for heart problems, he said.
“The combination of hydroxychloroquine plus azithromycin was reserved for selected patients with severe COVID-19 and with minimal cardiac risk factors,” the team wrote.
Henry Ford’s team said they believe their findings show that hydroxychloroquine could potentially be useful as a treatment for coronavirus.
“It is important to note that in the right settings, this could be a lifesaver for patients,” said Dr. Steven Kalkanis, CEO of the Henry Ford Medical Group, at the press conference.
Kalkanis said his findings do not necessarily contradict those of previous studies. “We also want to point out that just because our results differ from some others that may have been published, it does not make those studies incorrect or definitely conflict. What it simply means is that by looking at the nuanced data from which patients really benefited and when could we further unlock the code for how this disease works, “she said.
“Much more work is needed to figure out what the final treatment plan should be for Covid-19,” added Kalkanis. “But we feel … that these are critically important results to add to the mix of how we move forward if there is a second wave, and in other relevant parts of the world. Now we can help people fight this disease and reduce the death rate . “
Zervos said hydroxychloroquine can help directly interfere with the virus and also reduce inflammation.
Investigators who were not involved in the study were critical. They noted that Henry Ford’s team did not randomly treat patients, but instead selected them for various treatments based on certain criteria.
Henry Ford’s team wrote that 82% of their patients received hydroxychloroquine within the first 24 hours of admission, and 91% within the first 48 hours of admission.
By comparison, they wrote, a study of patients in 25 New York hospitals began taking the drug “any time during their hospital stay.”
“There may be a slight difference, but it’s not as if patients in New York started on day seven. That was not what happened,” said Eli Rosenberg, lead author of the New York study and associate professor of epidemiology at the University of Albany School of Public Health.
Rosenberg also noted that the Detroit newspaper excluded 267 patients, nearly 10% of the study population, who had not yet been discharged from the hospital.
He said this could have skewed the results to make hydroxychloroquine look better than it really was. Those patients could still have been in the hospital because they were very sick, and if they died, by excluding them from the study, hydroxychloroquine seemed more like a lifesaver than it really was.
“There is a little laziness here in all of this,” he told CNN.
Both the Detroit and New York studies were observational: They looked at how patients worked when doctors prescribed hydroxychloroquine.
While useful, observational studies are not as valuable as controlled clinical trials. Considered the gold standard in medicine, patients in a clinical trial are randomly assigned to take the medicine or a placebo, which is a treatment that does nothing. Doctors then follow patients to see how they are doing.
Two clinical trials on hydroxychloroquine for Covid-19, one in the US and one in the UK, were stopped early because their data suggested that hydroxychloroquine was not helpful.
The UK trial, led by the University of Oxford, enrolled more than 11,000 patients.
But a White House official praised the Henry Ford team’s study.
Peter Navarro, the White House business adviser, said the study shows that hydroxychloroquine works if given early enough.
“This is a big problem,” he told CNN. “This drug can save literally tens of thousands, perhaps hundreds of thousands of American lives, and perhaps millions of people worldwide.”
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