Posted on 04/15/2020 7:56:16 PM PDT by SeekAndFind
A drug that’s been touted by President Donald Trump as a “game changer” didn’t help hospitalized patients with coronavirus and was associated with heart complications, according to a new study.
“This provides evidence that hydroxychloroquine does not apparently treat patients with Covid 19,” said Dr. Paul Offit, an infectious disease specialist at Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia. “Even worse, there were side effects caused by the drug — heart toxicities that required it be discontinued.”
Trump has said that hydroxychloroquine shows “tremendous promise” and has made it sound like the drug is harmless.
“I think it’s going to be great,” Trump said at a White House briefing on March 19.
“What do you have to lose? Take it,” he said on April 4.
Physicians have warned that while Trump is enthusiastic about the drug, it still needs to be studied to see if it works and if it’s safe.
“People can claim what they want, but the proof is in the pudding, and this is the pudding,” Offit said.
In the French study, doctors looked back at medical records for 181 patients with Covid-19 who had pneumonia and required supplemental oxygen. About half had taken hydroxychloroquine within 48 hours of being admitted to the hospital, and the other half had not.
The doctors followed the patients and found there was no statistically significant difference in the death rates of the two groups, or their chances of being admitted to the intensive care unit.
The study also raised important safety concerns about hydroxychloroquine.
In the study, eight patients who took the drug developed abnormal heart rhythms and had to stop taking it.
Abnormal heart rhythms are a known side effect of hydroxychloroquine, which has been used for decades to treat patients with diseases such as malaria, lupus and rheumatoid arthritis.
Doctors in Sweden and Brazil have sounded warnings about chloroquine, a very similar drug, because of heart problems.
In the new study, among the 84 patients who took hydroxychloroquine, 20.2% were admitted to the ICU or died within seven days of taking the drug. Among the 97 patients who did not take the drug, 22.1% went to the ICU or died.
The difference was not determined to be statistically different
Looking just at deaths, 2.8% of the patients who took hydroxychloroquine died, and 4.6% of the patients who did not take it died. That difference was also not found to be statistically significant.
“These results do not support the use of [hydroxychloroquine] in patients hospitalised for documented SARSCoV-2-positive hypoxic pneumonia,” the study authors wrote.
The study was published Tuesday on medRxiv.org, a pre-print server founded by Yale University, the journal BMJ and Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory. Studies published on this website have not been peer reviewed.
The didn’t do the drug cocktail.
Pretty sure Offit is the big Pharma/vaccine guy that said that babies could take up to 10,000 vaccines at once.
“These results do not support the use of [hydroxychloroquine] in patients hospitalised for documented SARSCoV-2-positive hypoxic pneumonia,” the study authors wrote.
Abstract: https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.04.10.20060699v1
"We used data collected from routine care of all adults in 4 French hospitals with documented SARS-CoV-2 pneumonia and requiring oxygen"
Which fits with what the non-clinical results are showing. People who have more extreme cases of Covid-19 and have addtional conditions that make Covid-19 worse, are at the most risk of dying no matter what is done. AFAIK, anyone advocated HQL supports early detection and treatment becuase by the time it gets to the oxygen/ventilator stage it is likely too late.
This study does not refute the early use of HQL as its medical supporters advocate, despite what the title and tone of the article implies.
I am getting so tired with journalists, left and right wing, pretending to be academic experts when they are not, deliberately misrepresenting sources knowing most people won't check, and trying to fit what they do not understand into political narratives. Then turning around and treating anyone who does not go along with the informed ignorance they are trying to manufacture.
OK, I am definitely suffering from Stage II Stir Crazy and Stage II Cabin Fever right now.
Thank you for supporting everything I wrote in Post #11 above, you said it even better than me.
-—”The only surefire treatment is the election of brain-dead Biden. He wins, the virus disappears the next day.”-—
Not so fast,there. LOL Biden was Obama’s man for finding a cancer cure. Still waiting!
Bingo. It's not a single drug. It is regimen involving 3 drugs: HCQ + Azithromycin + Zinc.
They all three have to be taken together over the course of the treatment. It is best to follow this regimen.
IT HAS ZERO PERCENT RECOVERY in people who are already dead.
Talk about a flawed study.
Hypoxia is a condition in which the body or a region of the body is deprived of adequate oxygen supply at the tissue level. Hypoxia may be classified as either generalized, affecting the whole body, or local, affecting a region of the body.
You won’t see CNN report this from France:
Professor Didier Raoult Releases the Results of a New Hydroxychloroquine Treatment Study on 1061 Patients
The new study, of which the abstract was released today, was performed at IHU Méditerranée Infection, Marseille, France.
I’m not an MD but I can read, and everything I’ve read says HCQ does the most good when given as early in the progress of the disease as possible. And the reasons why make sense.
"Most of the patients included in this study had an inflammatory syndrome defined by C-reactive-protein higher than 40 mg/l, which suggests that a cytokine storm syndrome had already begun."
And yet today, there was a French Dr on with Dr Oz-whom I aint no fan of but wife is, that siad it works if taken at the right time.
Of those that died, he said that it was to late since they were already on ventilators.
>> Looking just at deaths, 2.8% of the patients who took hydroxychloroquine died, and 4.6% of the patients who did not take it died. That difference was also not found to be statistically significant. <<
So, you design a study with an impossibly small sample size, and when the HCQ cuts the death rate by 40%, you claim that the reduction is “statistically insignificant.”
There are conjectures by doctors that this is not really a respiratory disease. That it attacks the red blood cell ability to transport oxygen, causing something similar to high altitude hypoxia.
RE: Of those that died, he said that it was to late since they were already on ventilators.
That’s exactly what was said in this thread. See Post #11 and Post #23 and also Post #28
The title : “Hydroxychloroquine doesn’t help patients with coronavirus”
Is designed to mislead
“Looking just at deaths, 2.8% of the patients who took hydroxychloroquine died, and 4.6% of the patients who did not take it died. That difference was also not found to be statistically significant.”
So 1.6 fold more survived when taking the drug.
Drugs can approved on that.
Most conclusions would be a lager cohort is needed.
Thanks. The study concluded that basically it is to late for these patient unless we find a miracle drug.
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