Dhia Aldoori

Dhia Aldoori
Autumn 2011 in Ohio

Saturday, May 23, 2020

COVID-19: The Jury is Back on Hydroxychloroquine


At this time, I recommend against using chloroquine or hydroxychloroquine to prevent or treat COVID-19 infection. This recommendation is mostly based on the study published in the Lancet online, May 22, 2020.[1]
Included in this study were 96,032 hospitalized patients from 671 hospitals who were diagnosed with COVID-19 between Dec 20, 2019, and April 14, 2020 and met the inclusion criteria for said study. It was convincingly a large multinational real-world analysis.
The authors (who I agree with), did not observe any benefit of hydroxychloroquine or chloroquine (when used alone or in combination with a macrolide) on in-hospital outcomes, when initiated early after diagnosis of COVID-19. Each of the drug regimens of chloroquine or hydroxychloroquine alone or in combination with a macrolide was associated with an increased hazard for clinically significant occurrence of ventricular arrhythmias and increased risk of in-hospital death with COVID-19.[1]
[1]       M. R. Mehra, S. S. Desai, F. Ruschitzka, and A. N. Patel, “Hydroxychloroquine or chloroquine with or without a macrolide for treatment of COVID-19: a multinational registry analysis,” Lancet, vol. 0, no. 0, 2020. Link to study.

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