Tocilizumab, an intravenous anti-inflammatory drug used for rheumatoid arthritis, has been shown to reduce the risk of death in patients hospitalized with severe Covid-19, as well as reducing the risk of ventilation and time to life. hospital discharge.
Preliminary results emerged from the RECOVERY trial, which has been testing possible Covid-19 treatments since March 2020.
Tocilizumab was added to the trial in April 2020. The results have not yet been peer-reviewed or published in a medical journal, but are expected to be available in a prepress.
For the trial, 2,022 patients were randomly assigned tocilizumab and compared with 2,094 patients receiving standard care.
“There were 596 deaths among the tocilizumab group, 29%, and there were 694 deaths, 33%, in the regular care group. Therefore, this reduces the risk of death around a sixth or a seventh, “Martin Landray, a professor of medicine and epidemiology in the Nuffield Department of Public Health at Oxford University, and deputy chief investigator of the RECOVERY trial, said during a briefing Thursday.
“An absolute difference of four in a hundred,” Landray said. “You have to treat about 25 patients to save a patient, a life.”
Landray said the benefits were consistent across all patient groups studied.
The drug was also shown to have benefits for people who did not have mechanical ventilation at the start of the trial, with a risk of progression to mechanical ventilation or death being reduced from 38% to 33%.
On February 3, the U.S. National Institutes of Health released treatment guidelines that say that for patients in the intensive care unit, “there is not enough data to recommend for or against the use of tocilizumab. or sarilumab for the treatment of Covid-19 “. Sarilumab is a similar treatment for rheumatoid arthritis. For those who did not need ICU-level care, they recommended the use of medications except for a clinical trial.
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