BHOPAL: Plasma therapy demand is still on high among corona patients despite knowing it is not very much effective. Plasma therapy has not replaced medicines that are working effectively and patients are recovering from corona infection.
Plasma trial as per guidelines of Indian Medical Council and Research (ICMR) in various medical institutes and Gandhi Medical College, Bhopal, was one of them.
Dr Rita Saxena, HoD of plasma therapy at Gandhi Medical College, said, “Plasma therapy is not very much effective. It is clear in the final report of the plasma therapy trial. But inspite of it, patients demand plasma therapy. We provide them as per their demand.”
“Convalescent plasma (CP) therapy failed to benefit coronavirus (COVID-19) patients, the largest trial conducted across 39 hospitals in India and spearheaded by the ICMR,” Dr Rita added.
The trial spanning April-July enrolled 464 hospitalised patients with “moderate” COVID-19 and administered convalescent plasma — antibodies derived from plasma filtered from the blood of those who have recovered from COVID-19 — on some of them.
The idea was that such antibodies would neutralise replicating viruses and check the growth of the infection. “CP was not associated with a reduction in mortality or progression to severe COVID-19,” she added.
“This trial has high generalisability and approximates real-life setting of CP therapy in settings with limited laboratory capacity,” the authors concluded. The findings were reported in preprint repository MedRxiv, meaning that the report has not yet been peer-reviewed in a medical journal.
