A team of researchers from George Washington University grants new hope for those fearing severe illness and even death caused by the COVID-19 disease. Their study claims that a widespread drug could help protect our lungs in the face of the coronavirus and thus reduce the need for ventilators.
The great news comes from CNN.com, and the drug in question is aspirin (or acetylsalicylic acid). The medication is practically found in anybody’s drawer, and it’s usually used as a treatment for pain, inflammation, and fever.
Taking aspirin in low doses could be efficient in fighting COVID
We all know that aspirin is significantly cheaper than medication already used for fighting the coronavirus, and that is a great advantage. Researchers even suspect that aspirin can prevent the formation of tiny blood clots, which would be a key factor in fighting the SARS-CoV-2 virus.
Dr. Jonathan Chow from the George Washington School of Medicine and Health Sciences explained for CNN the following:
The reason why we started looking at aspirin and Covid is because in the spring we all realized that all these patients started to have a lot of thrombotic complications, or a lot of blood clots that have formed throughout their bodies.
Chow added:
That is why we thought that using an antiplatelet agent, or a blood thinner, like aspirin, might be helpful in Covid-19.
The research team analyzed the record of 412 patients from several US hospitals. Aspirin was given to about 24% of the patients less than 24 hours after their hospitalization or seven days before. The use of aspirin was associated with a 47% reduction in mortality, a 43% reduction in ICU admission, and a 44% reduction in mechanical ventilation.
However, we must not open the champagne just yet. Chow suggested that there’s still a need for a study to randomly assign patients to get either aspirin or a placebo. He said that the Recovery Trial from the UK would likely be decisive in revealing if aspirin truly is efficient enough against COVID-19.
The new study was published in the journal Anesthesia & Analgesia.
