Tocilizumab, an intravenous anti-inflammatory drug used for rheumatoid arthritis, has been shown to reduce the risk of death for patients hospitalized with severe Covid-19, as well as reducing the risk of ventilation and the time until hospital discharge.
The preliminary results came from the RECOVERY study, which has been testing potential treatments with Covid-19 since March 2020.
Tocilizumab was added to the study in April 2020. The results have not yet been peer-reviewed or published in a medical journal, but must be made available in a preprint.
For the trial, 2,022 patients were randomly allocated with tocilizumab and compared with 2,094 patients who received standard treatment.
“There were 596 deaths among people in the tocilizumab group, 29%, and there were 694 deaths, 33%, in the usual care group. So that’s a reduction in the risk of death by about a sixth or seventh, ”Martin Landray, professor of medicine and epidemiology at the University of Oxford’s Nuffield Department of Population Health and chief investigator in the RECOVERY study, said during a meeting on Thursday.
“An absolute difference of four out of a hundred,” said Landray. “You need to treat about 25 patients to save a patient, a life.”
Landray said the benefits were consistent across all patient groups studied.
The drug was also shown to have a benefit for people who were not on mechanical ventilation at the start of the study, with the risk of progressing to mechanical ventilation or death reducing from 38% to 33%.
On February 3, the US National Institutes of Health released treatment guidelines saying that for patients in the intensive care unit, “there is not enough data to recommend for or against the use of tocilizumab or sarilumab for the treatment of Covid- 19 ”. Sarilumab is a similar treatment for rheumatoid arthritis. For those who do not require care at the ICU level, they did not recommend the use of the drugs, except for a clinical trial.
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