El John A. Burns School of Medicine (JABSOM) at the University of Hawai‘i at Mānoa is one of the leading medical education institutions in the United States and may have found a drug that minimized the deadly outcome of Coronavirus.
Treatment for insomnia consists of improving sleep habits, behavior therapy, and identifying and treating underlying causes, maybe also a treatment to minimize the deadly outcome with COVID-19
The State of Hawaii COVID-19 joint Information Center Daily Digest released results of a study today.
Twenty researchers including from the University of Hawaii A. Burns School of Medicine Dr. Youping Deng found beneficial effects of hypnotics on clinical outcomes in the management of COVID-19 patients. The research team, which was co-led by a researcher from the Wuhan University of Science and Technology, reviewed the charts of 323 COVID-19 patients in hospitals from Jan. 8 – Feb. 20, 2020. A quarter of the patients were given a hypnotic drug used to treat insomnia, and 77 of the 82 had better clinical outcomes and were discharged. Of the five who had unfavorable outcomes, only one died.
Early this year, a researcher with the John A. Burns School of Medicine (JABSOM) collaborated with a colleague at the Tianyou Hospital of the Wuhan University of Science and Technology to seek associations between treatments and clinical outcomes with the Corona Virus Disease of 2019 (COVID-19). This may be the first report of the beneficial effect of hypnotics on clinical outcomes in the management of COVID-19 patients.
Twenty researchers in teams led by JABSOM’s Dr. Youping Deng and Dr. Ling Hu of Tianyou Hospital reviewed the charts of 323 hospitalized COVID-19 patients admitted from January 8, 2020, through February 20, 20202.
“Of those 323 patients, 82 or 25% were prescribed Zopiclone, a hypnotic drug used to treat insomnia, at a daily dose of 1mg for the duration of their hospital stay,” Dr. Deng said.
Of those 82 patients, 77 had better clinical outcomes and were discharged. Of the five patients receiving hypnotics who had unfavorable outcomes, only one died.
“Favorable outcomes were more prevalent among the patients on hypnotics versus non-hypnotics at the same disease stage,” Dr. Deng added. “For patients in the more severe disease groups, the improvement effect was even more pronounced.”
In their report, the teams noted that the patients usually showed strong anxiety, sleep deficiency, and oxygen insufficiency with disease progression. These findings suggest that better sleep quality and stress reduction may enhance the immune system and benefit admitted COVID-19 patients receiving hypnotics.
Aside from treating insomnia, Zopiclone helps the body by promoting autophagy activation, which promotes protection against infections. However, since only about 25% of patients in the study received hypnotics, the investigators note that self-healing may occur without medical intervention in many COVID-19 patients.
In analyzing the effect of hypnotics on rRT-PCR*-positive versus rRT-PCR-negative patients (with typical chest CT findings) at the time of diagnosis, hypnotics had a stronger association with improved outcome in the rRT-PCR-positive patients. Moreover, hypnotics were identified as an independent factor in the risk model that contributed to better clinical outcomes (P<0.001), including a better survival rate.
