[HN Gopher] L-arginine in severe Covid-19 decreases the length o...
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L-arginine in severe Covid-19 decreases the length of
hospitalization
Author : drocer88
Score : 25 points
Date : 2021-09-10 21:11 UTC (1 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.sciencedirect.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.sciencedirect.com)
| jleyank wrote:
| Isn't it easier to get vaxxed and reduce your chance of cytokine
| storm than to hope that there are existing compounds that can
| help repair lung damage once it's already occurring? There are
| already immunosuppressants that are cheap and widely available
| that reduce damage, and the search is on for things that inhibit
| viral replication. I think there is also research for universal
| antibodies that attack regions that are rarely mutated.
|
| Would be great if such last possibility treatments work as
| patients are usually post COVID by the time the lungs are shot.
| The course of other diseases would profit from lung repair,
| possibly even smoking damage.
| nradov wrote:
| It's not either / or. Vaccines aren't 100% effective so we
| still need treatments for breakthrough cases.
| saool wrote:
| 3.2g of arginine in a day doesn't sound like a lot. There's
| around 2g in most meat/protein servings, and 1g on each egg
| yolk[0]. I wonder how much of the study outcome is just the
| result of changing dietary habits of the patients.
|
| [0] http://www.dietandfitnesstoday.com/arginine.php
| nomel wrote:
| For those without access:
| https://www.thelancet.com/pdfs/journals/eclinm/PIIS2589-5370...
| criticaltinker wrote:
| This is yet another piece of compelling evidence showing that
| nutraceuticals can significantly reduce recovery time and improve
| health outcomes.
|
| Combined with _early_ treatment using widely available medicines,
| it's clear we have a variety of tools at our disposal to mitigate
| this pandemic.
|
| Unfortunately many people are unaware of the evidence supporting
| these types of treatments, partly because they receive such
| little attention in mass media.
|
| As usual I'm ready for the downvotes - for some reason people
| here think this information is contentious or disagreeable.
| Jimmc414 wrote:
| Upvoted. Here is a good breakdown of other contentious early
| Covid treatments.
|
| COVID-19 early treatment: real-time analysis of 917 studies
| https://c19early.com/
| ltbarcly3 wrote:
| I think your analysis is a little bit vague? There are an
| almost unlimited number of chemicals that might be tried to
| treat any given disease. You can't test all of them.
|
| If you limit the chemicals to those available at a vitamin
| store (which is how I'm interpreting 'nutraceutical') seems
| like a terrible strategy for how to deploy research resources.
| Almost no diseases are treatable in an effective way with these
| chemicals, and when there are positive results in a study
| involving these chemicals it is almost always not reproducible
| or the effect of the chemical is insufficient to justify using
| it. The vitamins and nutrients which we have evidence there is
| a benefit to taking are already added to almost every food
| product you can buy.
|
| The only people who seem to be motivated to push this strategy
| are the companies which profit from selling big plastic bottles
| covered with the most misleading claims they can legally make,
| and filled with what are basically placebo pills.
|
| I'm going to go ahead and make a prediction: There is nothing
| you can find in a vitamin shop, taken in any amount, that will
| end up demonstrating sufficient benefit to the treatment of
| COVID that it is worth using.
| nradov wrote:
| Have you reviewed the studies on Vitamin D? Several have
| shown significant benefits and the costs are low.
|
| https://vitamin-d-covid.shotwell.ca/
| voldacar wrote:
| Just wanted to say that this seems like really good data. Pre-
| registered RCT with a large n and a very significant measured
| effect.
|
| I kind of wonder how necessary/effective this treatment would be
| in people who are already enough protein, they didn't include
| info on the diets of the patients involved.
| criticaltinker wrote:
| For others who are curious, N=101 in the OP paper, which is a
| preliminary subset of the total subjects in the clinical trial
| (N=290, according to the registration).
|
| To your second point, arginine supplementation can still be
| helpful for otherwise healthy individuals who are undergoing
| physiological stress due to illness. FWIW there are some
| supporting references on the Wikipedia page.
| ltbarcly3 wrote:
| I'm not sure, the data seems oddly and unnecessarily skewed in
| terms of the group breakdown.
|
| - The placebo group was almost 10 years older on average. You
| might think that this would be fine, or even make the effect
| demonstrated even larger than the study suggests, except 8
| patients were removed from the placebo group due to being moved
| to the ICU before the start of the study. This introduces a
| massive amount of selection bias into the data when you only
| had 48 in the placebo group to start with.
|
| - The placebo group had about half as many women as a %
|
| Of course there is an attempt to remove these confounding
| factors in some of the data, but the big results appear to be
| un-adjusted numbers (number of days in hospital being reduced,
| reduction of the need for oxygen, etc).
|
| There is also an odd coincidence that they selected 53 patients
| for the Placebo group, and 48 for the L-Arginine group, and the
| groups lost 8 and 3 patients to the ICU respectively, so the
| final groups were both 45. Is this normal in these types of
| studies? Why wouldn't they have made the intention to treat
| population 50 for both cases?
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(page generated 2021-09-10 23:02 UTC)