The antiviral medication Paxlovid seems to reduce the chance of developing long COVID, researchers report.
In a large study of veterans’ medical records, Paxlovid lowered a person’s chance of landing in the hospital or dying from all causes in the six months following a COVID-19 infection. And the drug reduced the risk of developing 10 of 13 long-term health problems, researchers report March 23 in JAMA Internal Medicine. On average, the drug lowered the relative risk of developing the conditions by 26 percent, says Ziyad Al-Aly, a clinical epidemiologist at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis.
The antiviral drug provided protection against some heart problems, blood clots, kidney damage, muscle pain, fatigue, shortness of breath and two neurological conditions. But it did not lessen the chance of developing liver disease, cough or of getting diabetes after a COVID infection (SN: 1/4/22).
Paxlovid, made by the pharmaceutical company Pfizer, has previously been shown to reduce the chance that susceptible people will be hospitalized or die from COVID (SN: 1/11/22)). To assess the drug’s longer-term effects, Al-Aly and colleagues examined medical records from the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs’ health care system. The researchers found more than 280,000 patients who had a positive COVID test in 2022 and at least one risk factor for developing severe illness. Of those people, nearly 36,000 got Paxlovid within five days of their positive test result.
The team then compared the health outcomes of those who took Paxlovid with those who did not. Since omicron and its subvariants were circulating in 2022, the researchers compared people in the Paxlovid group only with people in the untreated group who were infected at the same time and in the same geographic region, Al-Aly says. Paxlovid takers had a reduced risk of post-COVID conditions regardless of whether the infection was their first or if they’d had prior…
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