Antidepressant Fluvoxamine Found Efficacy Against COVID-19; FDA Says It's Safe to Use, Cheap to Produce

Most drug treatments against COVID-19 that have been part of trials have not materialized, but large new research recently suggested that fluvoxamine, an antidepressant medication, might be different.

A Vox report said, since COVID-19 patients began to show up at hospitals and clinics a year and a half ago, researchers and medical practitioners have been working hard in an attempt to find out how to treat the virus.

Most drugs and therapeutics have not panned out, producing either any results at all or small ones in large-scale clinical trials. Many of these few treatments that are shown efficacy are costly, not to mention difficult to administer.

For instance, Hydroxychloroquine has been shown to have no quantifiable benefits. More so, new drugs such as monoclonal antibodies, proteins meant to emulate the response of the immune system to the disease, have been approved by regulators although they need to be administered by a doctor via an IV or series of inoculations.

Researchers have not stopped with their quest, though, and the outcomes of a new huge trial have suggested they are getting somewhere.

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Fluvoxamine, a Standout

In a massive, randomized clinical trial performed with thousands of patients over the last six months, McMaster University tested eight different treatments for COVID-19 against a control group to explore what's effective.

Out of tall eight treatments, one medication stood out-fluvoxamine. This is an antidepressant that the Food and Drug Administration has already to be "safe to use and cheap to produce as a generic drug."

These new findings follow some promising results in small-scale trials published in the Journal of the American Medical Association in 2020. In those smaller studies, scientists discovered that fluvoxamine was strikingly good at decreasing hospitalization for COVID-19 patients, although small-scale trials can at times turn up spurious positive results. Therefore, those findings were evidently tempered by many caveats.

The study, titled "TOGETHER study," is quite larger, involving over 3,000 patients across the entire research, with 800 participants belonging to the fluvoxamine group, and backs the promising outcomes from those past studies.

Lower Chances of Hospitalization

Patients who received fluvoxamine within a few days from getting tested positive for COVID-19 were found to be 31 percent less likely to end up on a ventilator.

In addition, death from the virus is rare enough that the research presents wide error bars regarding how much of this antidepressant reduces death, which means it is much more difficult to conclude.

It is a much more massive effect than any discovered for outpatient COVID-19 therapeutics thus far.

According to professor of health sciences Ed Mills at McMaster University, this is a huge finding. The game changers, he added, "are things we already had in the cupboards."

An Inexpensive Antidepressant for COVID-19

What's making the result potentially such a huge deal is that this antidepressant is inexpensive, not to mention, the FDA has already approved it for obsessive-compulsive disorder or OCD so that any doctor can prescribe it for COVID-19 with their clinical judgment. This is also known as "off-label" prescribing.

Fluvoxamine is a pill, and thus, it does not need to be administered by a medical practitioner or in a hospital.

To be clear, the study findings have just been released, and clinicians globally will want to take a close look at them as they decide on whether or not they'd prescribe fluvoxamine. Future studies could moderate this as an exciting result, as well.

Related information about Fluvoxamine as a treatment for COVID-19 is shown on CBS Detroit's YouTube video below: