Featured Review: Do blood thinners prevent people who are hospitalised with COVID-19 from developing blood clots?

This study reported a lower rate of death in people who received the treatment dose (34.2%) compared with the preventive dose (53%).This study reported major bleeding in 31.7% of participants who received the treatment dose compared with 20.5% of those who received the preventive dose.How reliable is this evidence?  We do not know whether blood thinners are a useful preventive treatment for people with COVID-19 because we are very uncertain about the evidence. None of the studies randomised participants and all were retrospective. Also, they reported different results from each other and did not report their methods fully. This means our confidence (certainty) in the evidence is very low.What happens next?The searches found 22 ongoing studies, 20 of which are RCTs, with 14,730 people.Ronald Flumignan, MD, PhD from the  Department of Surgery, Division of Vascular and Endovascular Surgery at the Universidade Federal de S ão Paulo in São Paulo, Brazil and lead author of this Cochrane Review says, " At the moment we are not sure whether this treatment may help prevent the dangerous clotting we see in some COVID-19 patients, but we identified several ongoing studies. We will update our review as new results from these studies become available, and in time we hope we will be able to answer this important question. ”Read the full Cochrane ReviewVisit the Cochrane Emergency and Critical Care Group websiteRead all the Cochrane resources and news on COVID-19Find out more about Co...
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