Two new ‘life-saving’ COVID-19 treatments discovered by UK doctors

[Chris Smith]

• UK researchers just announced that a widely studied drug in COVID-19 therapy can save lives if it’s administered to patients with severe COVID-19 in the first 24 hours of admittance to intensive care units.
• That’s tocilizumab, a drug the researchers found to be effective in coronavirus treatment in November. At the time, the scientists could not tell whether the drug can prevent death or just hasten recovery.
• The new data indicates that tocilizumab and sarilumab can save an extra life for every 12 critically ill COVID-19 patients.

A report in mid-November said a coronavirus drug showed great promise in treating severe COVID-19 during a study. The doctors were so impressed with the results that they had to stop the study early so that the placebo group in the research could also get access to the therapy. But researchers could not explain at the time how the drug worked. The researchers found that the treatment could increase survival rates and/or reduce recovery time, but couldn't explain why. “We don’t know that yet, we are hopeful it does both,” Imperial College London professor Anthony Gordon told BBC at the time. The doctors hoped the drug would become the standard of care.

The drug in question was tocilizumab, an anti-inflammatory drug that was studied at various times during the pandemic, making the news on more than one occasion. Some studies could not definitively demonstrate that the drug worked, but doctors didn't give up on it. This led to the UK study, which shared its conclusions in November. Since then, doctors have finally figured out how the drug works and how to save more lives.

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Two new ‘life-saving’ COVID-19 treatments discovered by UK doctors originally appeared on BGR.com on Sun, 10 Jan 2021 at 10:34:22 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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