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(CNN) - According to researchers in the UK, dexamethasone, a widely available steroid medication, may be key to helping treat the sickest covid-19 patients in hospital who require ventilation or oxygen. Their findings are preliminary, still being compiled, and have not been published in a peer-reviewed journal, but an outside expert called this a "breakthrough."
The two lead investigators of the Recovery Trial, a large UK clinical trial investigating possible treatments for covid-19, announced to reporters at a virtual press conference on Tuesday that a low-dose dexamethasone regimen was found to be during 10 days reduces the risk of death by one third among hospitalized patients in the trial requiring ventilation.
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"That is a statistically significant result," said Martin Landray, deputy chief investigator of the trial and professor at the University of Oxford, on Tuesday.
"This is a completely convincing result. If you look at patients who didn't need ventilators but who were receiving oxygen, there was also a significant reduction in risk of about a fifth, "said Landray. "However, we did not see any benefit in those patients who were in the hospital, had covid, but whose lungs worked well enough, did not take oxygen or respirators."
Landray added that "there are pending questions" and that people who treat covid-19 at home should not take dexamethasone as a result of these findings.
"We have not studied patients in the community," said Landray. "We did not show any effect in patients who do not require oxygen and we did not study patients who are not in the hospital."
The dexamethasone arm of the Recovery Trial, which was closed last week for researchers to collect data, included approximately 2,100 hospitalized covid-19 patients who were randomized to receive dexamethasone, and around 4,300 hospitalized covid patients. -19 who were randomized to receive the usual level of care in their hospitals.
In the trial, dexamethasone was given in a dose of 6 mg once a day for up to 10 days, administered as an injection or orally.
The researchers did not report serious adverse events among patients taking dexamethasone, but the results are preliminary.
"At this stage, we found no clear adverse effects from doing this. Let's admit there is a kind of two messages here. In people who needed oxygen or ventilation, it clearly works, and the benefits are greater for those who use ventilators. For people in the hospital with covid who don't require oxygen, so their lungs function moderately well, there's really no benefit, "Landray said Tuesday.
"In the trial, our focus was on mortality, which obviously a drug can affect in any direction, but the overall results in patients with oxygen and ventilation were a clear benefit," said Landray. "We have observed, for example, whether there were deaths due to other forms of infection, which are sometimes considered a risk. And the answer is no, there was no excess of any other cause of death in particular. ”