91–99 of 99 posts
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What's wrong with the size of the 30 patient experiment?
30 patients would be statistically significant. Problem is that they were non randomized, open-label, and they seemingly discarded some of the bad results. They also measured viral load, not cure, and the measurement was not done correctly in all cases. It's basically a "there could potentially be a causal link here; needs way more research" type of study.
This is evidence; it isn't great but it also isn't conclusive. We'll need to wait longer for something a little more decisive. A twitter link is also unhelpful because we only get a blurry abstract to go off. The happy dream is maybe hydroxychloroquine has prophylactic tendencies since it is something people can take long term to be at a substantially lower risk vs catching COVID. The abstract doesn't really show muc…
> The happy dream is maybe hydroxychloroquine has prophylactic tendencies since it is something people can take long term to be at a substantially lower risk vs catching COVID. It's an immune system inhibitor, so this seems like a bad plan.
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I've read about benefits not related to zinc, in addition to the zinc-related mechanism. It helps zinc get into the cell which prevents the replication of the virus, but there are additional benefits of this chemo medication. I'd have to take some time to find the particulars, if you read the original French study I think it details all the theoretical benefits. With any chemo drug I suspect it won't have a huge effe…
Hydroxychloroquine is not a chemo drug
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chemosensitizer
edit: It's still being researched, but it is an anti-cancer drug, just like how chemo drugs get classed.
https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lanonc/article/PIIS1470-2...
Chemo drugs aren't really a technical category, but it seems like chloroquine will become part of the anti-cancer family soon.
Given our recent discovery that chemotherapy has only gives you a 2% greater chance of survival (again, your immune system fights of cancer just like it fights off viruses), I'm not so hopeful here.
https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lanonc/article/PIIS1470-2...
(summary: chemotherapy actively kills people, some people would have survived without it)
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> Course, that'll only work if the symptoms are being caused by an overactive immune system and it's able to mediate that immune response in time. Accumulating evidence suggests that a subgroup of patients with severe COVID-19 might have a cytokine storm syndrome [1]. HCQ is known to moderate this reaction. [1] https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6...
I'm not sure if it would be able to mitigate a cytokine storm, but it could prevent it. When DW was on it for sepsis due to an auto-inflammatory condition, her progression was much slower than what I've read about cytokine storm.
Has anyone found the study they're talking about? This tweet is only a screenshot of the abstract. And the trials registry entry says "No results published": https://clinicaltrials.gov/ct2/show/NCT04261517 Update: I asked the person on twitter and here it is: http://subject.med.wanfangdata.com.cn/UpLoad/Files/202003/43... Apparently it's in chinese.
Median age for the control group and test group was 24yrs and 18yrs respectively. This isn't the ideal sample group for testing this drug for COVID-19 indication.
But more importantly... Dosing was only 400mg once per day versus recommended 500mg twice per day as performed in the French trial.
Taken together, this trial tells us very little on how this drug would perform at proper dosing on severe subjects in vulnerable age range and/or with prior co-morbidities.
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It does help if you read the translation. By now everybody should know that the successful dosis is 2x500mg per day for 10 days. Not 1x 400mg per day, which is the old dosis for Malaria prevention. This dosis needs at least 2-3 weeks to be effective (saturate the cell membranes with zinc), and by then the infection is already over. And the Chinese treatment plan contained much more. A study with zero value.
What's the source of this?
Amongst doctors both hydroxychloroquine sulfate and chloroquine phosphate run under broadband antiviral.
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Would the curve be different in an ideal situation where the hospitals weren't completely overrun and out of resources? Yes, of course. However, I would guess that if care was withheld, it was based on disease state and patient robustness. Age is part of that equation so it is hard to separate it out. In other words, a fit healthy, no comorbidity senior whose immune system is fighting hard is probably not having trea…
I was not suggesting that Italian doctors might be withholding treatment "just because of age." Clearly, as you state, there will always be a strong correlation between age and overall health. I was trying to point out that some people using the statistics about age and mortality from Italy are trying to use them as justification for doing less to combat the disease's spread, and that might be a dangerously misleadin…
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Across the United States, 38 percent of those hospitalized were between the ages of 20 and 54. Nationally, 12 percent of the intensive care patients were between the ages of 20 and 44. https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/23/nyregion/nyc-coronavirus-...
I keep hearing statistics like this and I yell at my TV every time. Counting up the people in the hospital is pretty easy, but it doesn't answer the more important question of how many infected 20-54 require hospitalization. Even comparing those numbers to the larger demographics would be helpful.
https://statmodeling.stat.columbia.edu/2020/03/07/coronaviru...
https://www.statista.com/chart/21173/hospitalization-icu-adm...
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Not exactly. HCQ has anti-inflammatory action as well as immune moderating action [1] the latter of which may help protect against cytokine storm which occurs in some serious COVID-19 infections. It also has antiviral action in some situations but it's not clear that that's actually relevant to COVID-19 yet. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hydroxychloroquine
Thanks. Upon reflecting, I meant to say immune moderating as well as anti-inflammatory. Which is why it's become so popular for treating arthritis. I wonder about the antiviral activity, though. What I've read is about possibly faster drop in virus levels. And I suppose that HCQ could be interfering with some stage of intracellular virus production. But time will tell.