A Low-Cost Steroid Shows Promise for Treating COVID-19. But Take the News With a Grain of Salt

Encouraging results from researchers looking into potential COVID-19 treatments are being hailed as a “groundbreaking development”—but recent history shows it’s worth taking these promising findings with a grain of salt. Investigators working on the U.K.-based RECOVERY trial announced today that dexamethasone, a low-cost and widely available steroid that lowers inflammation, improved patients’ chances of surviving severe COVID-19. During the study, about 2,100 COVID-19 patients were treated with dexamethasone for 10 days. Patients on mechanical ventilation who were given dexamethasone were 35% less likely to die compared to patients on ventilators who did not get the treatment. In patients on less invasive forms of breathing support, dexamethasone decreased the risk of death by 20%, while patients who did not require any respiratory help saw no improvements after taking the steroid. Those are promising findings, and it makes sense that an anti-inflammatory drug would be effective against a disease that’s most harmful when it spurs excess inflammation in the body. But there’s a big caveat: the researchers released only a summary of the data, rather than a complete, peer-reviewed paper. (The researchers said in a statement they’ll publish their full findings soon.) It’s understandable that these researchers would want to get the news out as soon as possible, given the possibility that dexamethasone could, based on the resul...
Source: TIME: Health - Category: Consumer Health News Authors: Tags: Uncategorized COVID-19 Source Type: news