Thumbs down for arthritis drug

Paris – Treating severely ill Covid-19 patients with the arthritis drug tocilizumab has no clinical benefit, according to the results of a trial stopped early due to an increase in deaths among those receiving it.

The trial, published yesterday in the BMJ medical journal, appeared to contradict earlier studies in which tocilizumab seemed to show promise in reducing the length of hospital stays for some patients.

The drug, a common treatment for arthritis, blocks a specific part of the body’s immune system that can go into overdrive in serious and critical Covid-19 cases.

It had been hoped that the treatment could reduce some of the more extreme inflammatory responses that can lead to death.

Researchers in Brazil conducted a randomised control trial among 129 patients with confirmed Covid-19 at nine hospitals.

Sixty five patients received tocilizumab plus standard care, while 64 were given standard care alone.

All patients were monitored for 15 days, by which time 18 (28%) in the tocilizumab group and 13 (20%) in the standard care group were either on ventilators or had died.

In all, 17% of the tocilizumab group had died due to acute respiratory failure. –