Public health researchers confirm antipsychotic drug could reduce Covid-19 deaths

Researchers from the Andalusian public health system have confirmed that aripiprazoleantipsychotic drug, may reduce mortality associated with Covid-19The results of this study were recently published in Scientific reports.

In particular, scientists from various institutions related to health, such as the Computational Medicine Platform of the Progreso y Salud Foundation; or the Institute of Biomedicine of Seville (IBIS Seville), studied the frequency of antipsychotic drug use in nearly 16,000 patients with Covid-19..

“Our goal was to find out if antipsychotics could have any effect, either positive or negative, on the fatal clinical symptoms caused by this disease,” explains Joaquin Dopaso, director of the Computational Medicine Platform.

Scientists studied eight antipsychotic drugs, and only aripiprazole showed significant reduction in the risk of death Covid-19, because, according to the researchers’ hypotheses, has a direct effect on the control of immunological pathways and induced inflammatory enzymes.which are fundamental to the Covid-19 disease.

Based on the results obtained, the researchers emphasize the need to combine experimental and clinical studies to clarify the relevance and consequences that the use of antipsychotics may have during the Covid-19 pandemic and in viral infections in general.

To conduct this study, the researchers used the Health Population Database (BPS) of the Andalusian Public Health System, a valuable and extensive electronic resource on health records launched in 2001. With more than 15 million users, the BPS is one of the largest clinical data repositories in the world and is an exceptional resource for conducting real-world evidence (RWE) studies. These types of studies are based on the use of so-called real-world data (RWD), which are related to patients’ health and the provision of health services and are collected regularly and from various sources of information, such as electronic health records, medication records, or health information from mobile devices, etc.

The Progreso y Salud Foundation’s Computational Medicine Platform has a dedicated infrastructure for conducting clinical research using health data in a safe and ethical manner, which recently won the Novartis-IESE award for operational excellence in health management. This infrastructure provides Andalusian public health with the appropriate means to manage, interpret and generate evidence (RWE) from real-world data (RWD) and is two years ahead of the European Health Data Space. This represents a transformative boost for the health system, which must evolve from a simple passive repository of clinical data to a generator of rapidly applicable biomedical knowledge.