Antiviral Drugs Against Severe Fever With Thrombocytopenia Syndrome Virus Infection

Takayama-Ito, Mutsuyo; Saijo, Masayuki

Notably, nifedipine is one of the most widely used drugs for treating hypertension and atherosclerosis in China. Thus, Li et al. (2019) performed a retrospective clinical investigation on a large cohort of 2087 patients with SFTS comprising 83 nifedipinetreated, who received nifedipine before admission and during hospitalization, 48 non-nifedipine-treated ones who received nifedipine before admission but not during hospitalization, and 249 general SFTS patients who did not receive nifedipine at all. The case fatality rate was decreased by >5-fold in the nifedipine-treated group (3.6%) compared with the general SFTS group (19.7%) or non-nifedipine treated group (20.8%) . In contrast with ribavirin, a significant decrease in the case fatality rate was also observed in the nifedipine-treated patients (2.4%) with a high viral load (>10 6 copies/mL) when compared with the general SFTS patients (29.0%) and nonnifedipine-treated patients (34.5%). Hematemesis, one of the hemorrhagic manifestations that are closely related to death, was found to occur less frequently in the nifedipine-treated group. In this article, the authors clearly showed the inhibitory effect of benidipine hydrochloride or nifedipine in cultured cells and an animal model. Most importantly, it was found that the nifedipine administration enhanced virus clearance and improved clinical recovery.