A commonly used asthma treatment appears to reduce the need for hospitalizations and recovery time for Covid-19 patients if given within seven days of symptoms appearing, researchers at the University of Oxford have found. The 28-day study of 146 patients found the inhaled steroid, budesonide, reduced the risk of urgent care, emergency room visits or hospitalization by 90% when compared with usual care. Patients treated at home with budesonide also had a quicker resolution of fever and fewer persistent symptoms. In a report posted on Monday on medRxiv ahead of peer review, the researchers said they undertook the trial because they noticed that patients with chronic respiratory diseases like asthma, who are often prescribed inhaled steroids such as budesonide, were not needing to be hospitalized for Covid-19 as often as expected. "I am heartened that a relatively safe, widely available and well studied medicine ... could have an impact on the pressures we are experiencing during the pandemic," said study leader Mona Bafadhel.

Experimental drug may speed viral clearance

An experimental antiviral drug significantly sped up the time it took to "clear" the virus in Covid-19 patients who did not need to be hospitalized, Toronto researchers have found. In a small trial, patients who received a single injection of peginterferon-lambda were more than four times as likely to test negative for the virus within seven days as patients who received a placebo. "The more rapid viral load decline and higher clearance rate were most pronounced in those with high viral loads" the authors reported on Friday in The Lancet Respiratory Medicine. "The magnitude of the viral load decline compared with that of placebo was much greater ... than has been reported with monoclonal antibody therapies," they added. "This treatment has large therapeutic potential," study leader Jordan Feld of Toronto Center for Liver Disease said in a statement. Respiratory symptoms also appeared to resolve faster with peginterferon-lambda therapy, but the trial was too small to demonstrate a statistically significant difference. Feld's team is planning a much larger trial, and studies are already underway testing the treatment in hospitalized patients.

Reuters