Aspirin does not improve survival rates in hospitalized Covid patients

June 10, 2021: -The cheap and widely available drug aspirin does not improve survival for patients hospitalized with Covid-19, a U.K. study has found.

Oxford University researchers hoped to find that blood-thinning medicine could help hospitalized Covid-19 patients at an increased risk of clots forming in their blood vessels, especially in the lungs. Still, found aspirin didn’t help to prevent deaths.

The study part of a more comprehensive “RECOVERY” trial investigating various possible treatments for people hospitalized with coronavirus involved around 15,000 patients hospitalized with the virus. Almost half of the patients were given 150mg of aspirin every day compared to the other half, given the usual care alone.

The study reveals that “there was no evidence that aspirin treatment reduced mortality” and “no significant difference” in the several people that died, with 17% of people in both groups dying in hospital after 28 days.

“The data show that in patients hospitalized with Covid-19, aspirin was not associated with reductions in 28-day mortality or in the risk of progressing to invasive mechanical ventilation or death,” Peter Horby, professor of emerging infectious diseases in the Nuffield Department of Medicine at the University of Oxford, and joint chief investigator for the RECOVERY trial said.

Martin Landray, a professor of medicine and epidemiology at the Nuffield Department of Population Health at the University of Oxford and one of the chief investigators in the study, said that the results are saying it was “disappointing.”

“There has been a strong suggestion that blood clotting may be responsible for deteriorating lung function and death in patients with severe Covid-19. Aspirin is not that expensive and is widely used in other diseases to reduce the risk of blood clots, so it is disappointing that it did not significantly impact these patients. This is why large randomized trials are so important to establish which treatments work and which do not,” the professor added.

The RECOVERY trial has made several life-saving discoveries, one being that dexamethasone, a cheap and widely used steroid, was able to save lives among severely ill Covid-19 patients already.

The results of the recent aspirin study will be published shortly on pre-print site medRxiv and have submitted to a leading peer-reviewed medical journal.