In a new study, researchers found that a 2,000-year-old medicine might offer hope against severe COVID-19.
The medication, called colchicine, is an anti-inflammatory taken as a pill. It’s long been prescribed for gout, a form of arthritis, and its history goes back centuries.
Doctors also sometimes use this drug to treat pericarditis, where the sac around the heart becomes inflamed.
The research was conducted by a team of Greek scientists at Attikon Hospital and elsewhere.
The study involved 105 Greek patients hospitalized in April with COVID-19.
Besides receiving standard antibiotics and antivirals (but not remdesivir), half of the participants got daily doses of colchicine for up to three weeks, while the other half did not.
The team found a big clinical benefit from colchicine in patients hospitalized with COVID-19.
Specifically, while the condition of seven of 50 patients who didn’t get colchicine clinically deteriorated” to a severe stage.
This was true for just one of the 55 patients who did receive colchicine.
The study size was too small to offer a definitive statement on whether colchicine should be used routinely against COVID-19.
But its effects on certain blood markers of heart function—as observed in the new study—suggest that colchicine has anti-inflammatory and anti-clotting effects that could help limit the cardiovascular damage wreaked by COVID-19.
Other researchers say the drug may also prevent heart conditions such as pericarditis and other inflammatory conditions affecting the body.
Colchicine may be a good medication of choice because unlike many drugs being tested in hospital patients, colchicine tablets are easy to take and inexpensive, so it could easily be used at home.
One author of the study is Dr. Spyridon Deftereos, a cardiologist at Attikon Hospital in Attiki, Greece.
The study is published in JAMA Network Open.
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