Covid-19 patients have a better tendency at recovery if given the antimalarial drug hydroxychloroquine, according to a new study.
A team at Henry Ford Health System in southeast Michigan discovered after a study of 2,541 hospitalized patients that those given the drug were far less likely to die, CNN reported.
Dr. Marcus Zervos, the system’s division head of infectious disease, said 26 percent of those not given hydroxychloroquine died, compared to 13 percent of those who got the drug.
“Overall crude mortality rates were 18.1 percent in the entire cohort, 13.5 percent in the hydroxychloroquine alone group, 20.1 percent among those receiving hydroxychloroquine plus azithromycin, 22.4 percent among the azithromycin alone group, and 26.4 percent for neither drug,” the team wrote in a report published in the International Journal of Infectious Diseases.
“Our results do differ from some other studies,” Zervos told a news conference. “What we think was important in ours … is that patients were treated early. For hydroxychloroquine to have a benefit, it needs to begin before the patients begin to suffer some of the severe immune reactions that patients can have with Covid,” he added.
The study came a little more than two weeks after the Food and Drug Administration reversed its emergency use authorization for hydroxychloroquine as a treatment for the coronavirus in hospitals, citing a lack of evidence it worked and that the risks outweighed any potential benefits.
The agency said the drug, along with a similar version called chloroquine, which is normally prescribed to treat malaria and some forms of severe arthritis, was “unlikely to be effective in treating COVID-19,” according to a statement.
Researchers not involved in the new research said it wasn’t as sound as others studies showing hydroxychloroquine did not help patients, and said other treatments, such as the use of the steroid dexamethasone, might have accounted for the better survival rate, according to CNN.
