https://www.post-journal.com/news/page-one/2020/09/promising-results/by Dennis Phillips
September 4, 2020
On Thursday, UPMC held an online press conference with Dr. Derek Angus, UPMC chief health care innovation officer and chair of critical care medicine at the University of Pittsburgh; Dr. Oscar Marroquin, UPMC chief health care data and analytics officer; and Dr. Donald Yealy, UPMC senior medical director and chair of the Emergency Medicine Department at UPMC and the University of Pittsburgh; to discuss the Randomized Embedded Multifactorial Adaptive Platform-Community Acquired Pneumonia (REMAP-CAP) corticosteroid trial.
Angus said the positive news from the trial is that hydrocortisone, a type of corticosteroid, reduces the odds of death and the use of life support for critically ill COVID-19 patients. He said the results of the trial caused the World Health Organization to issue new health guidelines for the use of corticosteroids.
Between March and June, the REMAP-CAP corticosteroid trial randomized 403 adult COVID-19 patients admitted to an intensive care unit to receive the steroid hydrocortisone or no steroids at all. The trial found a 93% probability that giving patients a seven-day intravenous course of hydrocortisone would result in better outcomes than not giving the steroid. The results were consistent across age, race and sex.
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