Use of fluvoxamine reduces hospitalizations due to Covid, study points out

Fluvoxamine, a drug originally indicated for the treatment of mental illnesses such as anxiety and depression, reduced hospitalizations in patients with Covid-19 by five percentage points, according to new research.

The study was carried out in 11 Brazilian cities and published in the scientific journal The Lancet Global Health.

Gilmar Reis, professor of the department of medicine at PUC-Minas and one of the authors of the research, explains that Covid-19 causes an unrestrained inflammatory process in cells, causing problems such as respiratory syndromes.

Scientists already knew that fluvoxamine is able to inhibit the inflammation process in cells. Therefore, the hypothesis was raised that the drug would be used to treat the new disease.

“[A Covid-19] activates the inflammatory process and [a fluvoxamina] it is a medication that inhibits this uncontrolled inflammation,” says the professor.

The study included 1,497 participants—all of whom were diagnosed with Covid, had symptoms of the disease, and some risk factor, such as obesity and diabetes. The researcher says that this group was chosen because they are the ones with the highest risk of complications.

Of the total, 741 participants received fluvoxamine and the other 756 were part of the placebo group.

In the main analysis, each patient took at least one pill and was instructed to use the drug for ten days. At this stage, 119 patients in the placebo group were hospitalized, against 79 among those who took fluvoxamine.

In a second moment, an analysis was made to identify the patients who followed the treatment for seven days. This is because some people end up stopping taking the drug, regardless of whether they have side effects or not, explains the researcher.

In the end, this subgroup that followed the seven-day protocol consisted of 548 people using fluvoxamine and 618 in the placebo group.

“To our surprise, we saw that only one patient had died among those who took the drug against 12 who had died [entre o placebo]”, says Reis about who spent a week using the medicine.

According to him, this data is interesting because it shows that “as patients took the medicine, mortality dropped a lot in the group that used [a flavoxamina]”.

For Otavio Berwanger, director of the Academic Research Organization at Albert Einstein Hospital and author of an editorial on the study, the research “is a very important and desirable step, but it is not a final word.”

He says further research is needed to answer some questions about the medication, such as how effective it is in people already vaccinated, whether it could be used with other drugs to treat the disease and what effect it has on patients with mild symptoms.

Berwanger further says the drug is not a substitute for vaccines, as it is not a prevention of coronavirus infection. “This drug also requires prescription and medical monitoring, it is not a medication that people could take anyway,” he says.