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Studies have found consistent benefits to using steroids for treating COVID-19, reports Katie Camero for the Miami Herald. She writes:
Steroids lowered the mortality rate among hospitalized coronavirus patients needing respiratory support compared to those receiving “usual” care and placebos, according to a new meta-analysis of seven international clinical trials.
In the more than 1,700 critically ill patients included in the randomized trials that spanned 12 countries on 5 continents, steroids were “clearly associated with benefit” in terms of reducing mortality risks and showed relatively consistent results in each trial, according to an editorial on the drugs and COVID-19 published Wednesday in JAMA Network.
Health experts call the treatment “an important step forward.”
“While much work remains on the exact details of implementation into clinical practice, the consistent findings of benefit in these studies provide definitive data that corticosteroids should be first-line treatment for critically ill patients with COVID-19,” the editorial said.
‘The COVID-19 pandemic has brought fear and a sea of change to the world. These studies provide evidence and some hope that an effective, inexpensive, and safe treatment has been identified. Hope because corticosteroids provide a widely available treatment for the most severely ill patients with COVID-19.”
Read more here.
