The World Health Organisation (WHO) has strongly recommended the use of cheap, widely available steroid drugs to combat severe or critical forms of COVID-19 caused by coronavirus infections. This comes at a time when the number of cases have touched 26 million globally, 3.8 million of them in India.

The announcement follows an analysis by seven international trials that concluded that patients on corticosteroid drugs have 20% reduced risk of death. The analysis – which collated data from separate trials of low dose hydrocortisone, dexamethasone and methylprednisolone – found that steroids improve survival rates of critical patients.

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The WHO panel made two recommendations: “A strong recommendation for systemic corticosteroid therapy and a conditional recommendation not to use corticosteroid therapy in patients with non-severe COVID-19.”

The WHO guidance defines critical COVID-19 by conditions, such as acute respiratory distress syndrome or septic shock, that require life-sustaining therapies. Signs of severe COVID-19 include low blood oxygen and respiratory distress.

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“Steroids are a cheap and readily available medication, and our analysis has confirmed that they are effective in reducing deaths amongst the people most severely affected by COVID-19,” Jonathan Sterne, a professor of medical statistics and epidemiology at Britain’s Bristol University who worked on the analysis, told a press briefing.

The trials were conducted in Britain, Brazil, Canada, China, France, Spain, and the United States and showed that drugs were beneficial in the sickest patients regardless of age or sex or how long patients had been ill.

This discovery could be a game-changer in the treatment of COVID-19 patients and all future studies and research.