https://medicalxpress.com/news/2021-08-heartburn-drug-doctors-covid-.html
In the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic, doctors in Wuhan noticed something surprising. Many of the elderly patients who survived the virus were poor: not exactly the demographic you would expect to fare well in a health crisis.
A review of the survivors' medical records revealed that a significant number suffered from chronic heartburn and were taking an inexpensive drug called famotidine, the key ingredient in Pepcid. (Wealthier patients tended to take the more costly drug omeprazole, found in Prilosec.)
Was an over-the-counter acid suppressant helping people survive COVID-19?
The team's analysis, which appeared in the journal Signal Transduction & Targeted Therapy (from the Nature publishing group), showed that the data supported findings from other smaller-scale studies. When delivered at high doses (the equivalent of about 10 Pepcid tablets), famotidine appears to improve the odds of survival for COVID-19 patients, especially when it is combined with aspirin. It also seems to hinder the severity of disease progression, making patients less likely to reach the point where they require intubation or a ventilator.
One of the most dangerous phenomena COVID-19 can trigger in your body is something called a cytokine storm, which is a potentially fatal amplification of an immune response. When you become sick, your immune system releases inflammatory proteins called cytokines that tell your immune cells how to fight the infection. But in more severe illnesses, cytokine production can spiral out of control, becoming dysregulated.
"Basically, your immune system goes haywire and starts attacking things like your otherwise healthy lung tissue because it's so desperate to kill off the invading virus," Mura said. "Your own physiology essentially uses a sledgehammer against the pathogen when a fly swatter would suffice."
The team's theory is that famotidine suppresses that reaction. Although it was developed with a specific purpose in mind—blocking the histamine receptors that help produce acid in your stomach—famotidine, like all other medications, can cause side effects. Mura and his colleagues believe that interfering with cytokine storms might be one of them.
"It may well be a case of famotidine having a beneficial off-target effect," Mura said. We generally think of side effects as a bad thing, but in some cases, they can be harnessed to treat other conditions. In the future, it's possible that famotidine could be re-purposed in this way.
https://medicalxpress.com/news/2020-06-widely-indigestion-drug-curb-covid-.html
A widely available and inexpensive drug that is used to ease the symptoms of indigestion may prove a worthy contender for treating COVID-19 infection in those whose disease doesn't require admission to hospital, suggest the findings of a small case series, published online in the journal Gut.
The effects were felt within 24 to 48 hours of taking famotidine, and a rigorous clinical trial is now warranted to see if the drug could be an effective treatment for COVID-19, say the researchers.
Famotidine (Pepcid AC) belongs to a class of drugs known as histamine-2 receptor antagonists, which reduce the amount of stomach acid produced. Famotidine can be taken in doses of 20-160 mg, up to four times a day, for the treatment of acid reflux and heartburn.
The researchers report on 10 people (6 men; 4 women) who developed COVID-19 infection, all of whom happened to have been taking famotidine during their illness.
Their ages ranged from 23 to 71 and they had a diverse range of ethnic backgrounds and known risk factors for COVID-19 severity, including high blood pressure and obesity.
All started taking famotidine when they were feeling very poorly with COVID-19, the symptoms of which had been going on from 2 up to 26 days at that point.
The most frequently used dose was 80 mg taken three times a day, with the average treatment period lasting 11 days, but ranging from 5 to 21 days.
All 10 patients said that symptoms quickly improved within 24-48 hours of starting famotidine and had mostly cleared up after 14 days.
Improvement was evident across all symptom categories assessed, but respiratory symptoms, such as cough and shortness of breath, improved more rapidly than systemic symptoms, such as fatigue.
Seven of the patients didn't experience any side effects while on famotidine, and in the three who did, these were mild, and all but temporary forgetfulness were known side effects associated with taking the drug.
https://hartfordhealthcare.org/about-us/news-press/news-detail?articleid=28305&publicId=395
The over-the-counter heartburn medication Pepcid might be one of the oddest answers to the COVID-19 question, with a preliminary Hartford Hospital research study showing benefit for patients with the virus.
Dr. Raymond McKay, a cardiologist at the Hartford HealthCare (HHC) Heart & Vascular Institute, is the primary investigator of the “Famotidine (Pepcid) Study,” which recently released data based on research involving 900 hospitalized HHC patients.
“There are many, many medications currently being tested to see if they have any therapeutic benefit in patients infected with COVID-19. Surprisingly, one of the most interesting drugs is Pepcid,” Dr. McKay said. “Researchers became interested in Pepcid following a recent report out of New York City and Columbia University suggesting that it was associated with a lower in hospital mortality in their COVID population.
“Because of that report, we decided to look at what impact Pepcid may have had in patients hospitalized with COVID-19 at Hartford HealthCare.”
They found that 83 of the approximately 900 HHC patients were treated with Pepcid at some time during their hospitalization. In those, the researchers pinpointed two results Dr. McKay called “basic” and “surprising.”
The findings:
Patients taking Pepcid were 45 percent less likely to die in the hospital and less likely to have combined adverse outcomes leading to death. The patients were also 48 percent less likely to need help breathing from a ventilator.
Pepcid use led to lower levels of certain blood tests associated with poorer outcomes from COVID-19.
As for aspirin:
https://clinicaltrials.gov/ct2/show/NCT04365309
Brief Summary:
COVID-19 has a high infection rate and mortality, and serious complications such as heart injury cannot be ignored. Cardiac dysfunction occurred in COVID-19 patients, but the law and mechanism of cardiac dysfunction remains unclear. The occurrence of progressive inflammatory factor storm and coagulation dysfunction in severe and fatal cases of NCP points out a new direction for reducing the incidence of severe and critically ill patients, shortening the length of duration in severe and critically ill patients and reducing the incidence of complications of cardiovascular diseases. Aspirin has the triple effects of inhibiting virus replication, anticoagulant and anti-inflammatory, but it has not received attention in the treatment and prevention of NCP. Although Aspirin is not commonly used in the guidelines for the treatment of NCP, it was widely used in the treatment and prevention of a variety of human diseases after its first synthesis in 1898. Subsequently, aspirin has been confirmed to have antiviral effect on multiple levels. Moreover, one study has confirmed that aspirin can inhibit virus replication by inhibiting prostaglandin E2 (PGE2) in macrophages and upregulation of type I interferon production. Subsequently, pharmacological studies have found that aspirin as an anti-inflammatory and analgesic drug by inhibiting cox-oxidase (COX). Under certain conditions, the platelet is the main contributor of innate immune response, studies have found that in the lung injury model in dynamic neutrophil and platelet aggregation.
In summary, the early use of aspirin in covid-19 patients, which has the effects of inhibiting virus replication, anti-platelet aggregation, anti-inflammatory and anti-lung injury, is expected to reduce the incidence of severe and critical patients, shorten the length of hospital duration and reduce the incidence of cardiovascular complications.
I'm not a doctor, and I have no intention of pretending to be one on the internet. In other words, I'm not offering any medical advice. With that being said, Pepcid AC and Aspirin are both inexpensive and safe OTC medications that the above citations suggest could help aid in the recovery of COVID-19. The recommendations (Pepcid: 80mg 3 per day; Aspirin: 100mg per day) fall within the FDA guidelines of recommended use for their intended purposes, therefore there shouldn't be any issues with the safety profile of such a regimen. That is to say, worse case scenario appears to be that while you're recovering from COVID, you won't have heartburn or a headache. Best case, your symptoms improve. Win-Win.
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