Nature: Ordinary antidepressants reduce the risk of death from the new coronavirus

This medicine is called fluvoxamine and is used to treat depression and obsessive-compulsive disorder
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But it is well known that it can also suppress the immune response and alleviate tissue damage.

"A major victory for drug reuse!" Vikas Sukhatme of Emory University School of Medicine in Atlanta, Georgia, researching drug reuse, wrote in an email to the journal Nature
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"For people at high risk of worsening disease who have not been vaccinated or cannot receive monoclonal antibodies, fluvoxamine should be used for treatment

COVID antibody treatment shows hope for preventing serious illness

The study’s co-author Angela Reiersen, a psychiatrist at Washington University School of Medicine in St.
Louis, Missouri, has long been interested in using fluvoxamine to treat a rare genetic disease

Reiersen and her colleagues collaborated with the organizers of the TOGETHER trial, which aims to identify approved drugs that can be used to treat COVID-19
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The team’s study included 1,497 COVID-19 patients in Brazil who are at high risk of serious illness

The test results announced on October 27 mean that fluvoxamine is one of the few treatments that has shown strong evidence to prevent the progression of COVID-19 from mild to severe
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The only early treatment recommended by the National Institutes of Health is monoclonal antibodies, which are expensive and difficult to implement in an outpatient setting

Experts are excited about this result, but emphasized that there are some things that need attention
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"We don't know if this applies outside of Brazil," said Paul Sax, an infectious disease expert at Brigham and Women's Hospital in Boston, Massachusetts

Taison Bell, an infectious disease expert at the University of Virginia in Charlottesville, questioned how the author defined severe COVID-19, which is one of the factors in evaluating the efficacy of fluvoxamine
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The research team checked whether people need more than 6 hours of treatment in an emergency, rather than using the more common indicators of hospitalization

A new crown drug for humans?

Edward Mills, a health researcher at McMaster University in Hamilton, Canada, is a co-author of the study.
He said that fluvoxamine's low cost can make it available all over the world

Mills said that fluvoxamine and drugs that interfere with virus replication may be more effective, such as Merck's upcoming antiviral drug molnupiravir
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"It will be very interesting to study whether the combined use of antiviral and anti-inflammatory drugs has a greater therapeutic effect than the use of two drugs alone
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