Lithium carbonate, a drug used to treat some psychiatric conditions such as resistant depression or bipolar disorder, has been shown to be effective against COVID-19 in patients who are hospitalized as a result of the disease. This has been announced by a group of researchers from the Álvaro Cunqueiro Hospital in Vigo.
The authors have already started testing lithium carbonate therapies since the beginning of the health emergency in Spain, and they had already carried out previous studies in which some evidence was found of this relationship between the drug used for 70 years and the coronavirus, which it has now been corroborated in a more consolidated study.
It was already known that lithium carbonate has the ability to inhibit various types of viruses, some of them very similar to SARS-CoV-2. In the current study, which has been published in Frontiers of Pharmacology, its effect has been tested in 30 hospitalized patients with COVID-19, of whom half were treated with the usual therapy and the other half with it and supplemented with lithium.
Lower risk of death in patients who took lithium
The results obtained after the trials showed that lithium reduced the number of days that patients remained hospitalized, decreased the symptoms of persistent COVID -sequelae of the disease that manifest after overcoming it-, as well as helped to lower the risk of death of patients. participants.
Lithium carbonate treatment improved the immune response and inflammatory levels of hospitalized patients, and all this without side effects
This, according to the researchers, could be due to the fact that lithium carbonate is capable of increasing the immune response of people, by increasing the levels of lymphocytes. In addition, it also helped prevent and decrease the inflammatory activity caused by infection, which is the main cause of problems in patients with a more serious prognosis.
The laboratory tests confirmed that the patients who received the drugs with lithium carbonate had a greater increase in lymphocyte defenses and a decrease in the levels of inflammatory cytokines, compared to people who only received conventional treatment.
On the other hand, the researchers have stressed that taking this drug by patients hospitalized with COVID-19 did not lead to the appearance of any type of side effects, so taking lithium during the disease has been shown to be safe in all patients analyzed.
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