KANSAS CITY, Mo. — A new study has identified dexamethasone, a commonly used steroid, as a possible treatment for COVID-19.
"We use it sometimes in patients who are in the hospital with asthma or COPD outbreaks where we need to really calm down that inflammation in the airwaves. So yes, it’s readily available and it’s been around a long time," said Dr. Sarah Boyd, an infectious disease physician at St. Luke's.
Doctors say dexamethasone could help suppress what experts call a "cytokine storm," which happens when the immune system works too hard against a virus such as COVID-19.
Truman Medical Center's Dr. Gary Salzman, chief of respiratory and critical care medicine, said suppressing that reaction might actually help COVID-19 patients.
"We didn't know whether these corticosteroids would do more harm than good because it would prevent the body's response to the virus," Salzman said. "But now we're thinking maybe the problem is that there's too much of an immune response. And these medications will suppress that immune response."
This steroid has emerged as a possible treatment for those with severe cases of COVID-19 and it's posing a challenge for physicians all over the world as they're adapting treatment for those patients.
"We were throwing the kitchen sink at people to do everything we could to save their life. We’ve now refined our treatments. There’s more refining to go and a lot of evolution to take place," said Dr. Dana Hawkinson of the University of Kansas Health System.
It's a challenge that doctors have faced before.
"I was around when we first had HIV. And that was a learning experience for us in HIV. And so now we have another new disease that we're having to try to learn about," Salzman said.
This global pandemic has the scientific and medical communities learning on the fly, and fast.
"We’ve only been dealing with this since January of 2020 and so the rapid progress is really unprecedented," Boyd said.
"We have learned from our experience. I think that we're getting better at taking care of the disease," Salzman said.
