Tocilizumab may have potential effectiveness to treat COVID-19

Objectives:
COVID-19 has become a global epidemic and effective therapies have not been discovered up to now. Therefore, this review article has been conducted.

Does tocilizumab have potential effectiveness to treat COVID?

Study design:
This review article included 13 retrospective case-control studies (n = 2,285 patients) and 6 retrospective single-armed studies (n = 208 patients).

Publication bias was not assessed because of the limited number of included studies.

Results and conclusions:   
The investigators found when compared to standard treatment group, tocilizumab treatment group non-significantly reduced risk of admission to ICU with 47% [OR = 0.53, 95% CI = 0.26 to 1.09].

The investigators found when compared to standard treatment group, tocilizumab treatment group significantly reduced risk of use of ventilation with 34% [OR = 0.66, 95% CI = 0.46 to 0.94].

The investigators found when compared to standard treatment group, tocilizumab treatment group significantly reduced risk of mortality with 56% [OR = 0.44, 95% CI = 0.36 to 0.55].
Sensitivity analysis indicated that the results would not be obviously changed by deleting any included study.

The investigators found patients treated with tocilizumab had better clinical improvement compared with the patients treated with standard treatment [OR = 1.24, 95% CI = 0.96 to 1.62].

The investigators found after taking tocilizumab, the patients had lower C-reactive protein (CRP) [WMD = - 99.66, 95% CI = -156.24 to -43.09], white blood cell count (WBC) [WMD = - 0.95, 95% CI = -1.8 to -0.11], aspartate aminotransferase (AST) [WMD = - 12.58, 95% CI = -18.88 to -6.29] but higher troponin [WMD = 7.61, 95% CI = 3.06 to 12.15] than before.  

The investigators found tocilizumab did not have significant influence on patients' neutrophil count (Neut), lymphocyte count (Lymp), platelet count (Plt), alanine aminotransferase (ALT) and creatine.

The investigators concluded tocilizumab may have potential effectiveness to treat COVID-19. However, more large-scale studies are needed for more accurate conclusions because of the limited sample size of this review article.

Original title:
Tocilizumab for treating COVID-19: a systemic review and meta-analysis of retrospective studies by Zhao M, Lu J, [...], Wu Y.

Link:
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7553373/

Additional information of El Mondo:
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