A safe, well-established antidepressant pill has proven effective at heading off severe COVID-19 cases, recent studies indicate.
Fluvoxamine dramatically reduced the risk of hospitalization for study participants who began the treatment at home soon after infection and completed the course, clinical-trial results show.
“A major victory for drug repurposing!” Emory University School of Medicine’s Dr. Vikas Sukhatme told the journal Nature in an email last month. “Fluvoxamine treatment should be adopted for those at high risk for deterioration who are not vaccinated or cannot receive monoclonal antibodies.”
When the coronavirus pandemic hit in 2020, with widespread reports of COVID-19 patients suffering inflammation-driven cytokine-storm attacks, Washington University psychiatrist Angela Reiersen turned to a 2019 study that concluded fluvoxamine reduced inflammation in mice with sepsis.
“I immediately thought back to that paper with the mice,” she said.
Rierson and other researchers conducted a study that tracked nearly 1,500 people in Brazil who were newly diagnosed with COVID-19. About half were treated with fluvoxamine, the rest with a placebo. The study concluded that among those treated with fluvoxamine, “COVID-19-related deaths fell by roughly 90%.”
An earlier, smaller study of 152 people with early COVID-19 found that “none of the 80 patients who had received the drug experienced serious clinical deterioration.”
“The patients who took fluvoxamine did not develop serious breathing difficulties or require hospitalization for problems with lung function,” psychiatry professor Eric Lenze said in a report published by St. Louis’ Washington University.
Of those who took the placebo in the smaller study, on the other hand, more than 8% ended up needing hospitalization and intensive medical intervention.
Fluvoximine is a selective serotine-reuptake inhibitor that is typically prescribed to treat depression, social-anxiety disorder and obsessive-compulsive disorder. At this time, the drug has not been approved by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration for the treatment of COVID-19 or any infection.
The findings from these studies are significant because fluvoxamine is plentiful, has been proven safe over many years of use (it was developed in the 1980s) and is cheap (a 10-day course costs about $4). It easily can be used worldwide, particularly in places where COVID-19 vaccines are not widely available.
Right now, Nature points out, “the only early-stage treatments currently recommended by the U.S. National Institutes of Health are monoclonal antibodies, which are costly and difficult to administer in an outpatient setting.”
— Douglas Perry
dperry@oregonian.com
@douglasmperry