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A UC San Francisco study has found that azithromycin, a common antibiotic prescribed for the treatment of Covid-19 works no better than a placebo in preventing symptoms of the infection among non-hospitalized patients.
It may even increase their chance of hospitalization, despite widespread prescription of the antibiotic for the disease, as per the study, according to an official press release published in the journal EurekAlert!
"These findings do not support the routine use of azithromycin for outpatient SARS-CoV-2 infection," said lead author Catherine E. Oldenburg, ScD, MPH, an assistant professor with the UCSF Proctor Foundation.
Azithromycin is a broad-spectrum antibiotic that is widely prescribed as a treatment for the disease in the United States and the rest of the world.
"The hypothesis is that it has anti-inflammatory properties that may help prevent progression if treated early in the disease," said Oldenburg.
"We did not find this to be the case.,” the researcher said.
The study was conducted in collaboration with Stanford University. It appeared in the Journal of the American Medical Association on July 16, 2021, It included 263 participants who all tested positive for Covid-19 within seven days before entering the study.
Study findings
All of these participants were non-hospitalised patients at the time of enrollment. In a random selection process, 171 participants received a single, 1.2 gram oral dose of azithromycin and 92 received an identical placebo.
50 per cent of participants remained symptom-free in both groups on day 14 of the study. By day 21, five of the participants who received azithromycin had been hospitalized with severe symptoms of Covid-19 whereas none of the participants who had received placebo had been hospitalised.
The research further concluded that a single dose of the antibiotic as treatment for the disease as compared to placebo did not increase the likelihood of being symptom-free.
"Most of the trials done so far with azithromycin have focused on hospitalized patients with pretty severe disease," said Oldenburg.
"Our paper is one of the first placebo-controlled studies showing no role for azithromycin in outpatients,” Oldenburg added.
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