Systematic review and meta-analysis of randomized trials of hydroxychloroquine for the prevention of COVID-19
Xabier García-Albéniz, Julia Del Amo, Rosa Polo, José Miguel Morales-Asencio, Miguel A Hernán
European Journal of Epidemiology, doi:10.1007/s10654-022-00891-4
Background Hydroxychloroquine (HCQ) is not an effective treatment for established coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) [1, 2], but it is unclear whether HCQ can prevent symptomatic COVID-19. Early in the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic, about 30 randomized trials were designed to study HCQ as prophylaxis for COVID-19 [3] . After the findings from two of these trials were reported in the Summer of 2020 [4, 5], HCQ was generally viewed by the medical community as ineffective for COVID-19 prophylaxis. The emergence of that consensus was surprising because both trials found a lower risk of COVID-19 in the HCQ group, though they were too small to rule out either benefit or harm of HCQ. A timely completion of the remaining trials would have generated precise estimates of the potential effectiveness Xabier García-Albéniz
manuscript. All authors made substantial contributions to the design of the study, interpreted the data, revised the manuscript critically, approved the version to be published and agree to be accountable for all aspects of the work. Code is available upon request from Xabier Garcia-Albeniz (xgarcia@rti.org). Funding No funding was received to support the development of this manuscript.
Declarations Competing Interests The authors have no relevant financial or nonfinancial interests to disclose.
Author contribution XGA and MAH analysed the data and drafted the Publisher's Note Springer Nature remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations.
Supplementary Information The online version contains supplementary material available at https://doi.org/10.1007/s10654-022-00891-4.
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