LONDON — An inexpensive steroid reduced deaths from coronavirus infection, helping some of the sickest patients with severe lung damage survive the illness, according to British clinical trial results announced Tuesday in a news release.
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The 60-year-old drug, dexamethasone, is the first medication shown to increase people’s chances of surviving covid-19, the disease caused by the novel coronavirus. It reduced the risk of death for patients on ventilators by a third and cut the risk of death for patients on oxygen by a fifth, heartening news that drew widespread interest and hope.
British regulators speedily approved the drug for use in hospitalized patients requiring oxygen, and Prime Minister Boris Johnson trumpeted the results, declaring there was “genuine cause to celebrate a remarkable British scientific achievement and the benefits it will bring not just in this country but around the world.”
Dexamethasone is a workhorse steroid typically used to treat inflammation, including flare-ups of rheumatoid arthritis, and was given as a tablet, liquid or as an intravenous preparation in the trial. Some other steroids are also being tested against covid-19.
Outside physicians tempered their optimism about the news with urgent calls to release details of researchers’ findings so doctors could pore over the data and understand the benefits and limitations of the drug.
“If this is reproducible and if it pans out, it’s a huge win — but that’s a lot of ‘ifs,’" said Isaac Bogoch, an infectious diseases specialist at Toronto General Hospital. “It’s cheap as borscht, as my grandparents would say. It’s widely available. Every single physician on the planet that practices hospital-based medicine is comfortable using this drug.”
But without complete data from the trial, physicians such as Bogoch are in a difficult predicament. Bogoch said that if a patient came into the hospital today with covid-19, he is not sure whether he would use the drug or when he would start it without more information. As of Tuesday afternoon, treatment guidelines from the World Health Organization and the National Institutes of Health recommended against using steroids because of the lack of evidence that the benefit of the drugs outweighs potential harm.
Anthony S. Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, said in an interview Tuesday that a group of experts who craft guidelines on treating covid-19 is already planning to meet to evaluate the data and assess whether recommendations should be changed.