Aspirin is particularly attractive because it is one of the most common non-drug recipes. Its cost, just cents per dose, is small compared to other commonly used drugs against Covid, such as remdesivir, which can cost thousands of dollars for a typical treatment course.
Aspirin can help prevent blood clots, which is why people who have had a heart attack are often advised to take a baby aspirin every day.
“The reason we started looking at aspirin and Covid is because we all realized in the spring that all of these patients have a lot of thrombotic complications, or a lot of blood clots that have formed through their bodies,” said Dr. Jonathan Chow said. , assistant professor of anesthesia and critical care medicine at the George Washington School of Medicine and Health Sciences, told CNN.
“Therefore, we thought that the use of an antiplatelet agent, or a blood thinner, like aspirin, might be helpful in COVID-19,” Chow said.
The team looked at the records of 412 patients admitted to several U.S. hospitals between March and July 2020. About 24% of patients took aspirin within 24 hours of hospitalization, or in the seven days before hospitalization , received. But most, 76%, did not receive the drug. Aspirin use was associated with a 44% reduction in mechanical ventilation, a 43% reduction in ICU uptake, and a 47% reduction for hospital deaths, the researchers found.
Other studies have made similar findings. One study, published in the journal PLOS One, looked at more than 30,000 American veterans with Covid-19 and found that those who were already taking aspirin had half the risk of dying than those who did not prescribe the daily pills. .
Chow warned that one limitation of his team’s new study was that it looked at medical records and did not randomly assign patients to take aspirin or placebo.