Dr. Christy explains the data and reasoning behind inhaled budesonide and gives guidance on how to move forward.
Hi and welcome to another edition of your health with dr. christy my name is dr. christy reisinger and today i’d like to speak to the quote silver bullet or inhaled corticosteroids for cova 19 dr. richard bartlett a physician in odessa texas has recently gotten a lot of press about using budesonide or inhaled corticosteroids for early kovat 19 symptoms i’d like to
Talk to y’all about why he thinks that is a beneficial treatment and about some of the data behind it and ways to move forward one interesting aspect about kovat 19 is that we would expect asthmatic patients to have worse outcomes with kovat 19 we have seen with other viral illnesses that asthmatics often suffer greatly because viruses tend to exacerbate someone’s
Asthma or it can increase their risk for pneumonia but with kovat 19 we’re simply not seeing that with asthmatics we’ve seen so far from data from new york city that asthma is not even in the top 10 comorbidities for cova 19 even though about 10 percent of new york city is thought to have asthma we’ve also seen data from china that says even though 5% of the
Population has asthma only about 1% of patients with asthma have been hospitalized for cova 19 furthermore we’ve also seen studies that have shown a stu expression may be decreased in patients with allergies and allergic asthma and therefore may help these patients to be less vulnerable to tsarskoe v2 or the virus that causes kovat 19 since the ace 2 receptors
Are the pathway in which the virus gets into the lungs and the respiratory system furthermore as i’ve mentioned previously in another video the recovery trial showed the great benefit of iv dexamethasone or an iv steroid in patients with severe kovat 19 symptoms patients that were on a ventilator or receiving oxygen had a mortality benefit when they received
Iv steroids and lastly in vitro or scientific studies meaning not on humans pretreatment with you desson id or the steroid that i mentioned in combination with other meds was shown to reduce corona virus replication we also know that in patients with asthma about 20 to 60 percent of them use some form of inhaled corticosteroid so the theory is what if inhaled
Corticosteroids are protective what if inhaled corticosteroids can use to help prevent progression to severe kovat 19 symptoms i do think there is some legitimacy in continuing to study this theory we know that iv dexamethasone is helpful for patients with severe kovat 19 symptoms but we don’t have much currently for patients with early symptoms of kovat 19 and
I think this would be such a great benefit to patients if this is proves to be helpful as i mentioned previously dr. richard bartlett has had personal success using inhaled budesonide also known as pulmicort the great thing about this medication is that it’s cheap and readily available and is able to be used outside of the hospital we don’t have any treatments so
Far for cova 19 that are easily available and readily used outside the hospital but i do need to stress that no randomized control trials have been done with inhaled budesonide everything that we know is very subjective it’s case studies and case reports and someone just saying that when they’ve used it on their patients it’s been shown to be beneficial i do know
That randomized control trials are currently underway and we’re anxiously awaiting those results however as with anything there are cons to possibly using inhaled budesonide we do know that if you use steroids for a long period of time it can increase your risk for cataracts osteoporosis and diabetes and in the short term it can increase your risk for thrush which
Is a fungus inside the mouth although this can be easily prevented by rinsing your mouth out after use and those other side effects are usually seen with long-term use and i’m just talking about a very short course of inhaled budesonide but as i mentioned previously at the end of the day we just simply don’t know if this is helpful for early kovat 19 symptoms we
Don’t know if this is helpful to prevent progression into more severe symptoms but i do think the data behind it is promising and i’m happy to see that dr. bartlett has had success with this medication but i’m unable to give you the treatment protocol we just don’t know the dose and for how long it needs to be used we don’t know whether nebulized form or inhaled
Form is better and currently if you have asthma and you’re on an inhaled corticosteroid such as fluticasone mometasone beck lobe methadone or be a do not stop your inhaled steroid there is a possibility that it could be protective so continue this medication and we certainly don’t want to have you stopped the medication and then have an asthma exacerbation i do
Hope that inhaled budesonide is shown to be helpful to prevent progression of worsening symptoms of co vat19 we’ll just have to wait and see thanks again for joining me
Transcribed from video
Is there a "SILVER BULLET" for COVID-19? By Christy Risinger MD
