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Coronavirus breakthrough: dexamethasone is first drug shown to save lives

In a large trial, a cheap and widely available steroid cut deaths by one-third among patients critically ill with COVID-19.
  1. Heidi Ledford
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An inexpensive and commonly used steroid can save the lives of people seriously ill with COVID-19, a randomized, controlled clinical trial in the United Kingdom has found. The drug, called dexamethasone, is the first shown to reduce deaths from the coronavirus that has killed more than 440,000 people globally. In the trial, it cut deaths by about one-third in patients who were on ventilators because of coronavirus infection.

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Nature 582, 469 (2020)

doi: https://doi.org/10.1038/d41586-020-01824-5

Updates & Corrections

  • Update 23 June 2020: This story has been updated to mention that the RECOVERY trial published the results of its dexamethasone trial in a preprint on 22 June.

References

  1. Horby, P. et al. Preprint at medRxiv https://doi.org/10.1101/2020.06.22.20137273 (2020).

  2. Beigel, J. H. et al. N. Engl. J. Med. https://doi.org/10.1056/NEJMoa2007764 (2020).

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