Oh neigh you didn't...
Authored by Brian C. Joondeph, MD: Aspirin is one of those drugs that has been around forever. It is commonly used as a pain reliever, anti-inflammatory, and blood thinner. Surprisingly it may also have benefits in treating COVID.
A paper in Anesthesia and Analgesia published last spring titled, “Aspirin use is associated with decreased mechanical ventilation, intensive care unit admission, and in-hospital mortality in hospitalized patients with coronavirus disease 2019.”
This was a retrospective, observational study of adult patients admitted to multiple hospitals in the U.S. between March and July 2020, in the early days of COVID. The primary outcome addressed by the researchers from George Washington University was the need for mechanical ventilation, which then, and still now, carries an extremely high chance of never leaving the ICU alive.
This was not a gold standard randomized prospective clinical trial. That would not be feasible in this situation since study patients were already hospitalized and critically ill. Remember in the early days, one needed to be extremely ill before even being admitted to the hospital rather than being sent home until sick enough to return and go straight to the ICU.
But the results were impressive. As reported last week by the Jerusalem Post,