Real-World Experience with Favipiravir for the Treatment of Mild-to-Moderate COVID-19 in India.

Background

Favipiravir, an RNA-dependent RNA polymerase inhibitor (RdRp), is a broad-spectrum oral antiviral agent approved in India under emergency use authorization, for the treatment of mild-to-moderate coronavirus disease (COVID-19). The present study was planned to evaluate the effectiveness and safety of favipiravir in real-world clinical practice.

Materials and Methods

This was a multicentric, retrospective, single-arm study conducted across four centres in India, after obtaining permission from the independent ethics committee. Medical records were analysed to evaluate effectiveness and safety of patients who were prescribed favipiravir.

Results

The medical records of a total of 360 patients met the inclusion criteria, with 358 of them available for the final analysis. Males made up 58.46% of the study population. The average age of enrolled patients was 51.80 ± 16.45 years. The most common symptoms were fever, cough, and myalgia-fatigue. The median time to clinical cure and fever relief was five and four days, respectively. The average length of stay in the hospital was six days. In total, 8% of the patients experienced adverse events. Hepatic enzyme elevation, diarrhoea, decreased appetite, headache, fatigue, and giddiness were the common symptoms.

Conclusion

In our real-world study, favipiravir was found to have a clinical cure rate of more than 90% in mild-to-moderate COVID-19 patients. This supports the use of favipiravir in the treatment of COVID-19. Favipiravir was well tolerated, with only minimal side effects, which were transient in nature.

Informations de copyright

© 2022 Joshi et al.

Déclaration de conflit d'intérêts

Dr. Sagar Bhagat, Dr. Saiprasad Patil and Dr. Hanmant Barkate are employees of Glenmark Pharmaceutical and had helped in the data analysis and manuscript writing. Dr Shashank Joshi reports speaker fees from Glenmark, during the conduct of the study; advisor, speaker fees consultancy from Glenmark, Novo, Twin Health, Marico, PHFI, Astra Zeneca, Roche Diabetes Care, Abbott, Biocon, Novo Nordisk, Sanofi, Torrent, Zydus Cadila, Bayer Zydus, MSD, Boehringer Ingelheim, Franco India, Alkem, Cipla, outside the submitted work. The authors report no other conflicts of interest in this work.