Cetirizine for COVID-19

Background and Objectives This study was aimed to determine the effect of antihistamines on Covid-19 disease. Subjects and Methods Two researchers searched online electronic databases PubMed, MEDLINE and Google Scholar from the beginning of the pandemic until December 30, 2022 using Mesh and keywords such as: "SARS-CoV-2" or "COVID-19" and "Antihistamine". Results The results depicted that levocetirizine, diphenhydramine, hydroxyzine, azelastine, dexchlorpheniramine, cetirizine, loratadine, desloratadine, fexofenadine, triprolidine, dimetindene, and famotidine are effective in treating and reducing the symptoms of Covid-19. Among them, famotidine had contradictory results, and although it may be a useful supplement in the treatment of covid-19, laboratory studies have failed to show the direct role of famotidine in controlling this disease. Conclusion From the above-discussed findings regarding antihistamines and Covid-19, specific antihistamines should be identified and included as an essential therapeutic approach for the management of Covid-19 alongside other approaches. In fact, antihistamines appear to be promising in the management of Covid-19 with a short time to relieve symptoms while giving the body enough time to reset its defense mechanism, thus reaching a rapid recovery. They work by both modulating histamine pathways and suppressing virus growth. Despite the fact that more trials and clinical studies still need to be done on the identification and deployment of potential antihistamines in the management of Covid-19, there is not enough time for this given the enormous threat of this global health crisis. Selective antihistamines, particularly histamine H1 receptor antagonists, should now be approved for emergency use for the management of Covid-19.

SARS-CoV-2 is the cause of the COVID-19 pandemic which has claimed more than 6.5 million lives worldwide, devastating the economy and overwhelming healthcare systems globally. The development of new drug molecules and vaccines has played a critical role in managing the pandemic; however, new variants of concern still pose a significant threat as the current vaccines cannot prevent all infections. This situation calls for the collaboration of biomedical scientists and healthcare workers across the world. Repurposing approved drugs is an effective way of fast-tracking new treatments for recently emerged diseases. To this end, we have assembled and curated a database consisting of 7817 compounds from the Compounds Australia Open Drug collection. We developed a set of eight filters based on indicators of efficacy and safety that were applied sequentially to down-select drugs that showed promise for drug repurposing efforts against SARS-CoV-2. Considerable effort was made to evaluate approximately 14,000 assay data points for SARS-CoV-2 FDA/TGA-approved drugs and provide an average activity score for 3539 compounds. The filtering process identified 12 FDA-approved molecules with established safety profiles that have plausible mechanisms for treating COVID-19 disease. The methodology developed in our study provides a template for prioritising drug candidates that can be repurposed for the safe, efficacious, and cost-effective treatment of COVID-19, long COVID, or any other future disease. We present our database in an easy-to-use interactive interface (CoviRx that was also developed to enable the scientific community to access to the data of over 7000 potential drugs and to implement alternative prioritisation and down-selection strategies.

Despite the extensive vaccination campaigns in many countries, COVID-19 is still a major worldwide health problem because of its associated morbidity and mortality. Therefore, finding efficient treatments as fast as possible is a pressing need. Drug repurposing constitutes a convenient alternative when the need for new drugs in an unexpected medical scenario is urgent, as is the case with COVID-19. Using data from a central registry of electronic health records (the Andalusian Population Health Database, BPS), the effect of prior consumption of drugs for other indications previous to the hospitalization with respect to patient survival was studied on a retrospective cohort of 15,968 individuals, comprising all COVID-19 patients hospitalized in Andalusia between January and November 2020. Covariate-adjusted hazard ratios and analysis of lymphocyte progression curves support a significant association between consumption of 21 different drugs and better patient survival. Contrarily, one drug, furosemide, displayed a significant increase in patient mortality.