In a significant discovery, data pooled from 121 hospitals in eight countries by clinicians and scientists have found that inexpensive, widely available steroids improve the odds that very sick Covid - 19 patients will survive the illness.
The analysis was conducted by the World Health Organization (WHO) and was published on Wednesday in the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA).
Based on the newly - published data, the WHO has issued new treatment guidelines calling for corticosteroids to become the standard of care for patients with "severe and critical" Covid - 19.
Such patients should receive 7 - 10 days of treatment, a WHO panel said, cautioning against the use of steroids in patients with non - severe illness, saying that "indiscriminate use of any therapy for Covid - 19 would potentially rapidly deplete global resources and deprive the patients who may benefit from it most as potentially life - saving therapy. "
"It is relatively rare in medicine that you find drugs where the evidence of their effectiveness in saving lives is so consistent, " said lead author of the study Derek Angus, Professor and Chair at the Department of Critical Care Medicine in the University of Pittsburgh.
"This is, in many respects, the single clearest answer we've had so far on how to manage terribly - ill Covid - 19 patients.
People on ventilators or oxygen and under intensive care should definitely be given corticosteroids, " Angus added.
This research suggested that steroids improve the survival of the sickest Covid - 19 patients.
"At the beginning of the year, at times it felt almost hopeless, knowing that we had no specific treatments.
It was a very worrying time.
Hello EnglishHello English
