Effectiveness of azvudine in reducing mortality of COVID-19 patients: a systematic review and meta-analysis
Yaqi Wang, Huaiya Xie, Luo Wang, Junping Fan, Ying Zhang, Siqi Pan, Wangji Zhou, Qiaoling Chen, Xueqi Liu, Aohua Wu, Hong Zhang, Jinglan Wang, Xinlun Tian
Virology Journal, doi:10.1186/s12985-024-02316-y
Background Azvudine has been approved for the treatment of coronavirus disease 2019 patients in China, and this meta-analysis aims to illustrate the safety of azvudine and its effectiveness in reducing mortality. Methods PubMed, Embase, Web of science, Cochrane Library and the Epistemonikos COVID-19 Living Overview of Evidence database (L.OVE) were searched to aggregate currently published studies. Cochrane risk of bias tool and ROBINS-I tool were used to assess the risk of bias of randomized controlled study and cohort study respectively. Odds radios (ORs) with 95% confidence interval (CIs) were combined for dichotomous variables. Publication bias was assessed by Egger's test and funnel plots. Results A total of 184 articles were retrieved from the included databases and 17 studies were included into the final analysis. Pooled analysis showed that azvudine significantly reduced mortality risk in COVID-19 patients compared with controls (OR: 0.41, 95%CI 0.31-0.54, p < 0.001). Besides, either mild to moderate or severe COVID-19 patients could benefit from azvudine administration. There was no significant difference in the incidence of ICU admission (OR: 0.90, 95%CI 0.47-1.72, p = 0.74) and invasive ventilation (OR: 0.94, 95%CI 0.54-1.62, p = 0.82) between azvudine and control group. The incidence of adverse events was similar between azvudine and control (OR: 1.26, 95%CI 0.59-2.70, p = 0.56).
Conclusions This meta-analysis suggests that azvudine could reduce the mortality risk of COVID-19 patients, and the safety of administration is acceptable.
Abbreviations
Supplementary Information The online version contains supplementary material available at https://doi. org/10.1186/s12985-024-02316-y.
Supplementary Material 1: Supplementary
Declarations Ethics approval and consent to participate Not applicable.
Consent for publication Not applicable.
Competing interests The authors declare no competing interests.
Publisher's Note Springer Nature remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations.
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