By Jerry Bellune

JerryBellune@yahoo.com

A proposed covid-19 treatment derided in the media is having positive results.

Steroid drugs including hydrocortisone have helped reduce severely ill covid-19 deaths.

This bolsters earlier preliminary evidence of these medications' benefit.

Multiple studies involving 1,700 patients used corticosteroid anti-inflammatory drugs.

These drugs ease the effects of over-active immune systems.

They helped reduce covid-19 deaths by nearly 33%, compared with patients who didn’t receive them, according to the Journal of the American Medical Association.

We have asked Lexington Medical Center officials if they have used or are considering using such drugs in treating covid-19 patients.

Scientists and physicians performed the World Health Organization study.

The authors analyzed the results of 7 studies between February and June that evaluated use of commonly used drugs dexamethasone, hydrocortisone and methylprednisolone.

The study found relatively consistent benefits in using the drugs in severely ill patients:

Of 678 severely ill patients who received steroids, only 32.7% died, compared with 41.5% of patients receiving other care or placebo.

The results raise hope that cheap, widely available drugs may become standard treatments for severe cases.

“This to me feels like one of the first unambiguous wins in trying to combat covid-19,” said co-author Derek C. Angus, a distinguished professor of critical-care medicine at the University of Pittsburgh.

He told The Wall Street Journal that the results are especially encouraging because it should lead to wide acceptance of steroids.

He cautioned that steroids appear to be beneficial only in the sickest hospital patients.

Dr. Angus said it is too soon to know for sure how steroids work to treat the illness.

They appear to damp a hyperactive immune response that is thought to be a major cause of death in some covid-19 patients.

“It’s almost death by friendly fire,” he said.

“You end up causing more trouble with your own immune system than the virus itself.”

The haywire immune response has sometimes been referred to as a “cytokine storm.”

Dr. Angus said that is too simplistic. Other immune system facets are at work, which may be why steroids help.

An overactive immune response is thought to harm the sickest covid-19 patients.