This steroid helped severely sick COVID-19 patients in an encouraging new study

By Ruth Reader

Researchers in England say they have found the first effective treatment for severe cases of COVID-19: dexamethasone, a steroid used to reduce inflammation.

Over the course of 10 days, 2,104 patients received 6 milligrams of the drug in a randomized trial. Another set of 4,321 patients were given usual care without the dexamethasone. Researchers found that 35% fewer patients on ventilators died when they took the dexamethasone. For patients on supplemental oxygen, dexamethasone appeared to reduce deaths by 20%. The drug did not benefit COVID-19 patients who didn’t need respiratory support.

The research comes from RECOVERY, a randomized clinical trial conducted by the Nuffield Department of Medicine and Nuffield Department of Population Health within the University of Oxford in the United Kingdom.

The program has been exploring six potential treatment for COVID-19, randomizing them among 11,500 patients across the U.K. In addition to dexamethasone, the group has looked at an HIV treatment called Lopinavir-Ritonavir; the antibiotic Azithromycin; another anti-inflammatory medication called Tocilizumab; Covalescent Plasma (which comes from recovered COVID-19 patients and contains appropriate antibodies); and the malaria drug Hydroxychloroquine. Earlier this month, the group found Hydroxychloroquine, made famous by President Trump, to be ineffective.

“Dexamethasone is the first drug to be shown to improve survival in COVID-19,” Peter Hornby, a chief investigator for the trial and professor of emerging infectious disease at Nuffield Department of Medicine, said in a release. “The survival benefit is clear and large in those patients who are sick enough to require oxygen treatment, so dexamethasone should now become standard of care in these patients.”
One of the reasons the finding is so welcome is because dexamethasone is relatively cheap. A bottle of 30, 4-milligram tablets retails for between $35-$47, according to GoodRx. Previously only one other drug, Remdesivir, originally developed to treat Ebola, was shown to shorten recovery time for COVID-19 patients. But it is incredibly expensive and the effects were not great. A study from late May noted that patients on Remdesivir were able to leave the hospital four days earlier than those on a placebo.
The RECOVERY trial highlights the importance of high-quality randomized controlled studies to deliver real information about medical results.
 
 

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