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The anti-parasitic drug ivermectin, increased in popularity According to the results of a large clinical trial, as an alternative treatment for Covid-19, despite the lack of strong research to support it, it showed no signs of alleviating the disease. published Wednesday.
The study’s authors said the study, which compared more than 1,300 people infected with coronavirus in Brazil who took ivermectin or a placebo, effectively ruled out the drug as a treatment for Covid.
An infectious disease specialist at the University of Minnesota, Dr. “There’s really no sign of any benefit,” said David Boulware.
The researchers shared a summary of these results during an online survey in August. presentation It was hosted by the National Institutes of Health, but the entire dataset has not been published in The New England Journal of Medicine until now.
Dr. “Now that people can dive into the details and data, hopefully this will lead many doctors to other treatments from ivermectin,” said Boulware.
For decades, ivermectin has been widely used to treat parasitic infections. At the beginning of the epidemic, while researchers were trying thousands of old drugs Laboratory experiments on cells against Covid-19 suggested that ivermectin could block the coronavirus.
At the time, skeptics pointed out that the experiments were working, thanks to the drug’s high concentrations – far beyond safe levels for humans. However, some doctors have started prescribing ivermectin for Covid-19. warning It is not approved for this type of use from the Food and Drug Administration.
Researchers around the world have conducted small clinical trials to see if the drug cures the disease. In December 2020, Andrew Hill, a virologist at the University of Liverpool in England, reviewed the results of 23 trials and concluded that ivermectin significantly reduced the risk of death from Covid-19.
If larger trials confirmed these findings, Dr. hill said “This is going to be a truly transformative treatment,” he said in a presentation at the time.
Ivermectin’s popularity continued to rise in the second year of the pandemic. Podcast producer Joe Rogan promoted US insurance companies in shows repeatedly in a single week in August spent Pays $2.4 million for ivermectin treatments
However, Dr. Shortly after Hill published his article review last summer, reports revealed that most of the studies it included in the analysis were flawed and in at least one case alleged fraudulent. Dr. Hill retracted his original study and started a new one. published In January.
Dr. In their second review, Hill and colleagues focused on the studies that were least likely to be biased. In this more stringent survey, the benefit of ivermectin disappeared.
Still, even the best studies on ivermectin and Covid were small, with at most a few hundred volunteers. Small studies may be vulnerable to statistical coincidence, suggesting positive effects when actually none. But larger studies were being done on ivermectin at the time, and these promised to be more rigorous.
In Brazil, researchers set up a clinical trial known as TOGETHER in June 2020 to test Covid patients with a range of commonly used drugs, including ivermectin. The treatments were double-blind, meaning neither patients nor medical staff knew whether they were taking a Covid treatment drug or a placebo.
In one round of the study, the researchers found promising evidence that an antidepressant drug was named after him. fluvoxamine reduced the need for hospitalization by a third. The researchers published their results in The Lancet Global Health in October.
In a new study published Wednesday, the TOGETHER team reported on ivermectin data. Between March and August 2021, researchers provided the drug to 679 patients for three days.
The results were clear: Taking ivermectin did not reduce a Covid patient’s risk of hospitalization.
Researchers focused on different groups of volunteers to see if they experienced benefits that others did not. For example, it may be possible for ivermectin to work only if taken early in an infection. But it turned out that volunteers who took ivermectin in the first three days after a positive coronavirus test had worse results than those in the placebo group.
Dr. Hill was impressed with the results. “They ran a high-quality, placebo-controlled trial,” he said. He also expressed his impatience as the New England Journal of Medicine took months to publish the results: “I don’t understand the delay in this trial from NEJM.”
Julia Morin, a spokesperson for the magazine, declined to comment on the delay. “We do not comment on the editorial process as it is confidential,” he said in an email.
Dr. Hill rerun the analysis of ivermectin studies, this time including new data from the TOGETHER trial. All told, his analysis involved more than 5,000 people. And once again he saw no benefit from ivermectin.
Still, there are several randomized trials of ivermectin in progress with thousands of volunteers who have yet to share their results. The National Center for the Advancement of Translation Sciences, part of the NIH, has been conducting a closely watched study for over a year. ivermectin trial and a few other medicines for Covid patients. But he hasn’t published the results yet.
As program director in the clinical innovations division at NCATS, Dr. Sarah Dunsmore said the researchers analyzed the first batch of results on ivermectin and will publish them in two to three months.
Dr. Because the TOGETHER trial was so large and carefully designed, Boulware was skeptical that additional trials would come to a different conclusion. “You rarely expect to find anything different,” he said.
At Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston, infectious disease specialist who was not involved in the TOGETHER case, Dr. Paul Sax, Dr. He shared Boulware’s opinion.
“I welcome the results of other clinical trials and will look at them with an open mind, but at some point continuing to explore a hopeless approach will turn out to be a waste of resources,” he said.
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