Washington, DC – January 22, 2021 – New research shows that non-steroidal anti-inflammatory drugs (NSAIDs) reduced both antibody and inflammatory responses to SARS-CoV-2 infection in mice. The study will appear this week in the Iris Virology, a publication of the American Society for Microbiology.
The research is important because “NSAIDs are arguably the most common anti-inflammatory drugs,” said lead researcher Craig B. Wilen, associate professor of laboratory medicine and immunology, Yale University School of Medicine.
In addition to taking NSAIDs for harmful conditions such as arthritis, people take them “for shorter periods during infections, and [during] acute inflammation as known as COVID-19, and for side effects from vaccines, such as soreness, fever, and malaise, “Dr. Wilen said. Our work suggests that meloxicam NSAIDs impair the immune response to SARS-CoV-2 infection. ”
The research also suggests that the effects of NSAID use during natural and immunosuppressive infections should be evaluated in humans, Dr. Wilen said. “This data seems to exist, especially in the clinical trials for the vaccines, so it should be mined to see if it triggers antibody responses in humans.”
“Taking NSAIDs during COVID-19 may be harmful or beneficial, depending on the timing of the administration,” Dr.Wilen said. The potent anti-inflammatory, dexamethasone (not NSAID), harms COVID-19 sufferers when taken early in the disease, but is beneficial when administered at later levels of COVID -19, said Dr. Wilen.
Similarly, the anti-inflammatory activity of NSAIDs may be destructive early in SARS-CoV-2 infection, because at this stage, inflammation is usually helpful. That changes at later levels of COVID-19, especially if the patient is experiencing severe inflammation called a cytokine storm. Cytokine storm is an immune response of inflammatory compounds that frequently occurs in COVID-19 patients, can cause complications, require intensive care unit, and even death.
A decrease in the neutralization of antibodies caused by NSAIDs may be abnormal, or it may adversely affect the ability of the immune system to fight the disease in the early stages of the disease. It could also reduce the extent and / or duration of protection against natural diseases or vaccines, Dr. Wilen said.
The first impetus for studying the effect of NSAIDs on COVID-19 was “the twitter thread, suggesting that NSAIDs should not be used during COVID-19,” Dr. Wilen said. “This looked suspicious to us, so we wanted to investigate.”
Dr. Wilen and his team expected NSAIDs to have little to no effect on viral infection, which was correct. They also believed that NSAIDs would not significantly affect antibody response to natural infectivity. “In fact, we didn’t even look carefully at the antibody response, because we didn’t expect NSAIDs to change it. This was wrong,” Dr. Wilen said.
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