Chloroquine and hydroxychloroquine are two of the most hyped drugs being studied as treatments for covid-19, thanks in large part to President Donald Trump’s repeated promotion during his public appearances. Trump told reporters this week he had been taking hydroxychloroquine as a preventive measure. But a new study published Friday in The Lancet suggests not just that the drugs don’t offer any real benefit to infected patients, but that they can increase the risk of heart problems or even death.
What are these drugs again? Chloroquine and its less toxic alternative, hydroxychloroquine, are widely used antimalarial drugs Since chloroquine was discovered over 85 years ago, it’s been studied pretty extensively. It’s now very cheap to manufacture, and we know its side effects. Some previous research indicates that it can prevent a virus from replicating inside a host cell. We still don’t know exactly how effective these drugs are when it comes to treating covid-19.
The new study: A team of American researchers looked at the records of 14,888 hospitalized covid-19 patients who received one of four treatments: chloroquine alone, chloroquine with a macrolide (a class of antibiotics), hydroxychloroquine alone, or hydroxychloroquine with a macrolide. Those records were compared with those of another 81,144 patients who did not receive any of these drug regimens.
