Low-dose radiation therapy to the lungs has been shown to accelerate recovery in hospitalized COVID-19 patients with pneumonia, according to a new study.
The research team at the Emory University Winship Cancer Institute in Georgia treated 10 patients with the therapy and compared the clinical results with 10 patients in a control group.
The findings, which have not yet been peer-reviewed, were published Tuesday on the medRxiv prepress server.
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The team suggested that the therapy could reduce the severe inflammation associated with the coronavirus and improve patient outcomes.
The researchers wrote that radiation therapy allowed for significantly faster clinical recovery. Those treated with radiation recovered in three days, as opposed to 12 days in the control group.
Time to hospital discharge was reduced by eight days, 12, compared to 20 in the control group, and intubation was reduced to 10 percent of patients, compared to 40 percent for the control group.
“This report suggests the potential ability to improve the results of recent randomized trials with a 10-minute treatment that carries minimal toxicity and is well tolerated even in frail elderly patients,” the study authors wrote.
However, other critical care physicians were less convinced. Doctors (not involved in the study) at Johns Hopkins Medicine and the Cleveland Clinic issued a warning due to the small sample size of the study.
“We have to evaluate this type of study very carefully,” Dr. Humberto Choi, a pulmonologist and critical care expert at the Cleveland Clinic, told Fox News in an email statement. “It is not uncommon for us to find positive results in small studies like this, and then, in larger randomized controlled trials, to discover that the positive benefit is unconfirmed.”
Choi also noted that radiation can cause side effects like lung inflammation, scarring, and there is also a risk of developing cancer. She said it can sometimes take months or years to see the side effects.
“I don’t know if this test is going to convince someone to follow this where steroids (referred to as dexamethasone) are cheap and can be administered directly in the ICU ward and have much better results than the radiation test.” Panagis Galiatsatos, an associate professor and physician of pulmonary and critical care medicine at Johns Hopkins Medicine, told Fox News.
Earlier last month, researchers at the University of Oxford announced that dexamethasone was found to reduce deaths in patients receiving oxygen by one-fifth and those on ventilators by one-third.
While Galiatsatos applauded the authors for continuing the trial, he said he will need a larger group to see any changes in medical treatment and to see if radiation is effective overall.
“10 patients are not going to move mountains, especially when other things come up that are much more promising,” he said.
“Ongoing international efforts to assess the optimal role of LD-RT (low-dose radiation therapy) in COVID-19 pneumonia are warranted,” the Emory researchers wrote in the study.
The researchers wrote that an active Phase 3 trial will compare this therapy with clinicians’ choice of COVID-19-targeted therapies in these patients.
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