Evidence and the main adverse effects regarding drug therapies in the war against COVID-19.

Mora-Ramírez, Mauricio; Melgoza-Hernández, Paulina; Toledo-Ramírez, Sebastian Eduardo; Aranguré, Juan Manuel Mejía

BACKGROUND Nowadays, the breakthrough of COVID-19 pandemic around the world is the biggest health challenge for the clinicians, and it represents an unexpected effort to identify effective treatment for those patients. No proven definitive therapies for this infection currently exist. Unfortunately, the infected patients increased in an alarming way every day, faster than medical evidence. At present, the expanding knowledge regarding SARS-COV-2 virology provides several potential drug targets. OBJECTIVE Therefore, clinicians need a rapid review and guideline about the main adverse effects regarding the most prescribed drugs and, specifically, the efficacy and potential risk of each pharmacological therapy, during hospital care. METHODS The articles review was performed using PubMed to identify relevant papers in English language reported through July 20th, 2020; a second review was performed using Web of Science until August 28th. Due to the lack of randomized clinical trials, we included case reports, case series, and reviews. We found 1606 total articles related. The authors independently reviewed the titles and abstracts for inclusion. CONCLUSION At present, despite the enormous medical effort for publishing several trials or case reports, we have not yet discovered a definitive therapy against the COVID-19 infection. This brief review aims to prompt identification of risk factors and main adverse effects in a systematic view related to therapy with partial evidence proposed to date.