Health News | COVID Patients on Antidepressants Less Likely to Die: Study
Get latest articles and stories on Health at LatestLY. The findings of a study of health records from 87 health care centres across the United States have shown that people taking a class of antidepressants called selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors (SSRIs) were less likely to die due to COVID-19.
Washington [US], November 20 (ANI): The findings of a study of health records from 87 health care centres across the United States have shown that people taking a class of antidepressants called selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors (SSRIs) were less likely to die due to COVID-19.
The findings of the study were published in the journal 'JAMA Network Open'.
Also Read | Air Pollution May Lead to Premature Birth, Poor Brain Development: Experts.
The results add to a body of evidence indicating that SSRIs may have beneficial effects against the worst symptoms of COVID-19, although large randomised clinical trials are needed to prove this.
"We can't tell if the drugs are causing these effects, but the statistical analysis is showing significant association. There's power in the numbers," said Marina Sirota, PhD, associate professor of paediatrics and a member of the Bakar Computational Health Sciences Institute (BCHSI) at UC San Francisco.
Also Read | Delta-Like SARS-CoV-2 Variant of COVID-19 May Increase Pandemic Severity: Study.
The UCSF-Stanford research team analysed electronic health records from the Cerner Real World COVID-19 de-identified database, which had information from almost 500,000 patients across the US. This included 83,584 adult patients diagnosed with COVID-19 between January and September 2020. Of those, 3,401 patients were prescribed SSRIs.
The large size of the dataset enabled researchers to compare the outcomes of patients with COVID-19 on SSRIs to a matched set of patients with COVID-19 who were not taking them, thus teasing out the effects of age, sex, race, ethnicity, and comorbidities associated with severe COVID-19, such as diabetes and heart disease, as well as the other medications the patients were taking.
The results showed that patients taking fluoxetine were 28 per cent less likely to die; those taking either fluoxetine or another SSRI called fluvoxamine were 26 per cent less likely to die; the entire group of patients taking any kind of SSRI was 8 per cent less likely to die than the matched patient controls.
Though the effects are smaller than those found in recent clinical trials of new antivirals developed by Pfizer and Merck, the researchers said more treatment options are still needed to help bring the pandemic to an end.
"The results are encouraging. It's important to find as many options as possible for treating any condition. A particular drug or treatment may not work or be well tolerated by everyone. Data from electronic medical records allow us to quickly look into existing drugs that could be repurposed for treating COVID-19 or other conditions," said Tomiko Oskotsky, MD, a research scientist in Sirota's lab at BCHSI.
Other authors include David K. Stevenson, MD, Ivana Maric, PhD, Ronald J Wong, PhD, and Nima Aghaeepour, PhD, of Stanford University; and Alice Tang and Boris Oskotsky, PhD, of UCSF. (ANI)
(The above story is verified and authored by ANI staff, ANI is South Asia's leading multimedia news agency with over 100 bureaus in India, South Asia and across the globe. ANI brings the latest news on Politics and Current Affairs in India & around the World, Sports, Health, Fitness, Entertainment, & News. The views appearing in the above post do not reflect the opinions of LatestLY)