Covid-19: an antidepressant already on the market effective in reducing hospitalizations? – LCI

The search for treatments for Covid-19 is taking a good turn. While France has ordered 50,000 doses of the anti-Covid pill from the American laboratory Merck, the discovery of another effective remedy against the virus seems promising. According to a clinical trial published Wednesday, fluvoxamine, an antidepressant drug, is able to reduce hospitalizations in patients with Covid-19 and at risk of severe forms.

“Fluvoxamine, a drug that already exists and whose cost is reduced”, underline moreover the researchers who carried out this study published in the Lancet Global Health, a publication linked to the benchmark journal Lancet but distinct from it. The molecule is indeed used as an antidepressant, and also against obsessive-compulsive disorders.

Previous studies already gave hope that fluvoxamine is of such interest against Covid-19, but they had been carried out on small samples and their methodology made their conclusions very uncertain.

However, this study was carried out on more than 700 patients hospitalized in ten Brazilian establishments. The group of volunteers was compared to an equivalent number of patients on placebo, and without the caregivers knowing what treatment they were administering. These patients presented at least one risk factor: being over 50, smoking, being diabetic, not being vaccinated …

The study measured how many patients in each group were ultimately hospitalized after 28 days or had to spend more than six hours in an emergency department on one occasion. In the end, fewer patients treated with fluvoxamine than those on placebo – 11% versus 16% – found themselves in one of these two situations.

“This study clearly suggests that fluvoxamine is an effective, safe, inexpensive and fairly well tolerated option for treating non-hospitalized Covid-19 patients”, judges researcher Otavio Berwanger, not associated with the trial, in a commentary published by the journal.

However, it also points to the limits of the study. It does not allow to conclude on the effect of the drug to reduce deaths and, even in terms of hospitalizations, its conclusions are weakened by the fact of having mixed two criteria. The authors justify the choice to take emergency services into account because Brazilian hospitals have been overloaded by the Covid crisis and could not have taken care of patients who needed it.