LOS ANGELES: Antibiotics that are commonly prescribed for Covid-19, Azithromycin, are no more effective than plasebo in preventing viral diseases among patients who are not treated in hospitals, and maybe in fact increasing their inpatient likelihood, a study has been found.
This study, published in the Journal of the American Medical Association, included 263 participants who were all tested positive for SARS-COV-2, the virus which caused Covid-19, within seven days before entering the study.
No participants were hospitalized at the time of registration.
Researchers at the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF) and Stanford University in the US chose 171 participants randomly to receive oral doses of 1.2 grams of azithromycin and 92 received identical placebo.
On the 14th day of the study, 50 percent of participants remained symptoms free in both groups.
On the 21st day, five participants who received Azithromycin had been hospitalized with severe symptoms of Covid-19 and no placebo groups treated at the hospital.
“Among outpatients with SARS-COV-2 infection, treatment with a single dose of oral azithromycin compared to placebo does not produce the possibility of greater than symptoms on the 14th day,” the writers wrote in this study.
The researchers concluded that treatment with a single dose of azithromycin compared to placebo did not produce greater possibilities than free symptoms.
“This finding does not support the routine use of Azithromycin for the SARS-COV-2 outpatient infection,” said the main author of Catherine E.
Oldenburg, an assistant professor at UCSF.
“The hypothesis is that it has anti-inflammatory properties that can help prevent developments if treated at the beginning of the disease.
We did not find this as the case,” said Oldenburg.
Azithromycin, broad spectrum antibiotics, are widely prescribed as a treatment for Covid-19 throughout the world.
Most of the trial was carried out so far with azithromycin focusing on patients treated in hospitals with severe diseases, the researchers said.
“Our paper is one of the first placebo-controlled studies that do not show a role for azithromycin in outpatient patients,” Oldenburg added.