Don-touted drug may help, might kill, or do nothing;
The much-hyped malaria drug hydroxychloroquine is fast becoming a household name amid feverish debate over its potential to treat coronavirus.
Small studies in France and China found some early promise, and President Trump hailed it as a possible “game changer.”
But experts warn the positive data so far are largely anecdotal. They say larger, more rigorous trials are needed. Doctors tracking the drug’s use in major hospitals also report scant, if any, clinical benefit.
Concerned physicians, meanwhile, warn the drug is known to cause potentially life-threatening abnormal heartbeats in 1% of patients.
“When you’re only treating 100 people, this 1% at-risk category for the drug causing drug-induced sudden cardiac death is just not going to rear its head,” Dr. Michael Ackerman, a genetic cardiologist and director of Mayo Clinic’s Windland Smith Rice Sudden Death Genomics Laboratory, told the Daily News.
But if the drug is given to 1 million sick people, that 1% rate of abnormal heartbeats — medically, ventricular arrhythmias — might be a big problem.
“That’s 10,000 people standing close to the edge,” said Ackerman, coauthor of a paper on what he called the hydroxychloroquine’s potential “lethal dark side.”
Among the latest research fueling the ongoing debate is a study published Wednesday in medRXiv that found hydoxychloroquine given to half the patients in a 62-person trial in Wuhan, China, appeared to speed recovery.
The patients enrolled in the trial at Renmin Hospital of Wuhan University all had COVID-19 with mild respiratory symptoms. Those who received hydroxychloroquine recovered a day sooner than other patients, the study’s authors reported. None of the patients in the treatment group progressed to severe disease — but four patients in the group who didn’t receive the drug did, the authors said.
Another Chinese study, of 30 COVID-19 patients in Shanghai, found those who took hydroxychloroquine were no better off than those treated without the drug.
Physicians in France have reported similarly conflicting results. A study from a controversial virologist in Marseille enrolled 20 hydroxychloroquine-treated patients and 16 control patients.
It found that patients treated with both hydroxychloroquine and the antibiotic azithromycin enjoyed a “synergistic effect” that put them in the study’s “cured” category. It also said that hydroxychloroquine alone “virologically cured” 70% of patients.
Experts warned studies with such small samples are unreliable, and that maybe patients simply fought off the virus on their own. Still, Trump cited t he research in an enthusiastic Twitter post last month.
A followup French study published Tuesday by Dr. Jean-Michel Molina from the Université de Paris found that hydroxychloriquine and azithromycin administered in the same exact dosing regimen as given to the patients in Marseille showed no discernible benefit.
On Thursday, Eric Caumes, the head of infectious diseases at the PitiéSalpêtrière hospital in Paris, said he