Study Finds Hydroxychloroquine May Have Boosted Survival. Other Researchers Have Doubts

“A surprising new study found the controversial antimalarial drug hydroxychloroquine helped patients better survive in the hospital,” reports CNN. “But the findings, like the federal government’s use of the drug itself, were disputed.”
A team at Henry Ford Health System in southeast Michigan said Thursday their study of 2,541 hospitalized patients found that those given hydroxychloroquine were much less likely to die. Dr. Marcus Zervos, division head of infectious disease for Henry Ford Health System, said 26% of those not given hydroxychloroquine died, compared to 13% of those who got the drug. The team looked back at everyone treated in the hospital system since the first patient in March. “Overall crude mortality rates were 18.1% in the entire cohort, 13.5% in the hydroxychloroquine alone group, 20.1% among those receiving hydroxychloroquine plus azithromycin, 22.4% among the azithromycin alone group, and 26.4% for neither drug,” the team wrote in a report published in the International Journal of Infectious Diseases. It’s a surprising finding because several other studies have found no benefit from hydroxychloroquine, a drug originally developed to treat and prevent malaria… “Our results do differ from some other studies,” Zervos told a news conference. “What we think was important in ours … is that patients were treated early. For hydroxychloroquine to have a benefit, it needs to begin before the patients begin to suffer some of the severe immune reactions that patients can have with Covid,” he added. The Henry Ford team also monitored patients carefully for heart problems, he said… Researchers not involved with the study were critical. They noted that the Henry Ford team did not randomly treat patients but selected them for various treatments based on certain criteria. “As the Henry Ford Health System became more experienced in treating patients with COVID-19, survival may have improved, regardless of the use of specific therapies,” Dr. Todd Lee of the Royal Victoria Hospital in Montreal, Canada, and colleagues wrote in a commentary in the same journal. “Finally, concomitant steroid use in patients receiving hydroxychloroquine was more than double the non-treated group. This is relevant considering the recent RECOVERY trial that showed a mortality benefit with dexamethasone.” The steroid dexamethasone can reduce inflammation in seriously ill patients… Eli Rosenberg [lead author of a New York study of hydroxychloroquine], also pointed out that the Detroit paper excluded 267 patients — nearly 10% of the study population — who had not yet been discharged from the hospital. He said this might have skewed the results to make hydroxychloroquine look better than it really was. “There’s a little bit of loosey-goosiness here in all this,” he told CNN.