The largest study of its kind published today showed that a malaria medication prescribed as a possible treatment for the Covid-19 virus did not show any benefit recommending its preference over standard care methods, and was actually associated with recording more deaths.
The US government funded a study to analyze the response of older US military personnel to the drug "hydroxychloroquine", whose results were published on a medical site before it was reviewed by peer researchers.
The team wrote in its study, "The use of hydroxychloroquine alone is linked to an increased risk of death compared to standard care alone."
The researchers looked at the medical records of 368 military personnel. Ex-hospitals across the country who have either died or have been discharged by April 11th.
Mortality rates for patients who took hydroxychloroquine were 28%, compared to 22% for those who took it with the antibiotic azithromycin - a mixture favored by French scientist Didier Rawl and a study published last March spurred global interest in it. The death rate for those receiving standard care was just 11%.
"Hydroxychloroquine", with or without azithromycin, was prescribed to patients with more severe symptoms, but researchers found that increased mortality continued even after they statistically modified the model with higher use rates. Another disadvantage is that the study did not randomly select patients in the research groups, because it performed a retrospective analysis of what actually happened.
In addition, it is difficult to generalize the results because the respondents had specific characteristics: most of them were males with an average age of over 65 and black, a group disproportionately affected by underlying diseases such as diabetes and heart disease.
There was no additional risk of having a respiratory system among the group that only took hydroxychloroquine, which prompted the authors to suggest that an increased mortality rate between this group may be due to extra-respiratory side effects.
And previous research has concluded that the drug carries risks for patients with problems with a tachycardia and can cause coma, seizures, or sometimes heart attack in this group.
The two drugs received great attention during the Covid-19 pandemic, as laboratory research showed that they were able to prevent the virus from entering cells and prevent its reproduction, but in the world of drugs it happens a lot that researchers fail to repeat what they observed in the laboratory in vivo.