My husband (76 years old) has COPD. He always has preventive prednisone in the house, which he can take immediately if he becomes very short of breath. Prednisone is really a miracle cure: shortness of breath is reduced within an hour. Is this product also used in the corona and can you get off the ventilator faster?
That has been done, but for now, a brother of prednisone, dexamethasone, seems to be a better choice. Both are corticosteroids: strong inhibitors of inflammatory reactions. Indeed sometimes miracle cures, but also a bit risky. When your body is introduced to an unknown pathogen (such as a new cold virus or coronavirus), an inflammatory response is triggered. Special white blood cells destroy all your infected cells with virus and all. During that first phase, you suffer from a sore throat and runny nose with a common cold, intended to ‘wash off’ pathogens from your mucous membranes.
With corona, the inflammatory reaction can get so out of hand that your lungs fill up with fluid and you end up in intensive care (IC), or worse. Corticosteroids inhibit inflammatory reactions and that appears to be life-saving in the IC. But the virus also gets free rein. As a result, the number of virus particles in the blood increases rapidly. That is why people did not dare to give these resources at the beginning of the corona epidemic. So it is not something to get started with at home. If your husband is very short of breath, the prednisone will help, but he must do a corona test right away.
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