[ad_1]
– We felt we had our backs to the wall when we took the step of treating this seriously ill woman with steroids. Sometimes the situation is that you have to try, that you don’t see another way out, says Chief Physician Eirik Hugaas Ofstad, from the Emergency Department and Observation Department at Nordland Hospital Bodø.
Ofstad is also an Associate Professor in the Department of Community Medicine at the University of Tromsø – University of the Norwegian Arctic.
Common medicines give hope to the crown
The corona-sick woman in her 60s had acute pulmonary insufficiency syndrome triggered by COVID-19 and was still seriously ill after three weeks of intensive care.
It arises from a so-called short case report, which Ofstad and his colleagues have written in the Journal of the Norwegian Medical Association.
see more
19 days with respirator
The woman, who had been previously treated for breast cancer, was hospitalized in mid-March, at a time when Norway had a situation of uncontrolled infection that caused the closure of much of the society.
When doctors decided to try steroid treatment, the woman had been on a ventilator for 19 days and all the indicator arrows were pointing in the wrong direction.
Ofstad believes that the steroid treatment probably saved his life.
– We must be honest in saying that otherwise we do not think we would have saved her, says the department head to Dagbladet.
Difficult decision
Having the seriously ill woman receiving steroid treatment was not an easy choice.
In its March recommendations, the World Health Organization initially advised against steroid treatment for patients with COVID-19 and acute pulmonary insufficiency syndrome.
Doctors relied on an expert panel, the Surviving Sepsis Campaign, for a weak recommendation to treat these patients with steroids.
For this woman, at least, the treatment seems to have had a very good effect, although the doctors, in their article, admit that the improvement may have been accidental or the result of other factors.
“But we believe this case study may help shed light on the use of steroid therapy in severe COVID-19,” write the journal authors.
– Significant improvement
– We experienced a remarkable improvement in this woman in 48 hours, says Ofstad.
Then the patient could be gradually withdrawn from respiratory therapy, a treatment that had lasted a total of 28 days.
38 days after admission, the patient was transferred from the intensive care unit to the ward. Then he had lost 15 kilos of weight.
She was discharged from a specialized rehabilitation center 56 days after being admitted to the hospital.
– In retrospect, it seems that through steroid treatment we managed to stop the inflammatory changes in the woman’s lung tissue. Steroids are used to suppress the body’s immune response, which runs amok in the face of a virus that the body does not know about. Therefore, the body shoots at the targets in the attack on this virus, explains Ofstad.
This week, there has been an international controversy over steroid treatment for coronavirus disease, after several studies have now shown promising results indicating that these cheap and readily available drugs appear to reduce mortality in severely ill COVID-19 patients. .
[ad_2]
