The study, which was conducted by Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis and funded by the COVID-19 Early Treatment Fund, gathered 152 adults with mild COVID-19 cases living in Missouri or Illinois. Via home delivery, 80 participants received fluvoxamine, and 72received a placebo. Fluvoxamine has significant anti-inflammatory properties that medical researchers believe could prevent the body’s inflammatory reactions to the novel coronavirus.
None of the participants who took fluvoxamine hit the endpoint of clinical deterioration — oxygen saturation of 92 percent or lower as well as difficulty breathing or hospitalization for pneumonia — but six of the participants who took a placebo did. The researchers concluded that fluvoxamine, if taken within the first seven days of first symptoms of COVID-19, could reduce the risk of hospitalization.
“The results of the fluvoxamine trial are encouraging and warrant a further evaluation in a larger study,” Carolyn Machamer, PhD, a professor of cell biology at the Baltimore-based Johns Hopkins School of Medicine and a member of the COVID-19 Early Treatment Fund’s scientific advisory board said in a news release. “A treatment that can prevent lung problems in people with mild symptoms of COVID-19 is desperately needed.”
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