Study of the effectiveness of immunotropic therapy of Long-COVID-19 patients with type 6 of human herpes virus reactivation, Zubchenko et al., 2024

Introduction. After the acute form of COVID-19, 10 to 30% of patients tend to develop a post-covid syndrome or long-COVID-19. Research is actively being conducted into the causes of long-term COVID-19, one of which may be a violation of the immune response after SARS-CoV2 enters the body as a superantigen and the reactivation of “latent” viruses, in particular, human herpes virus type 6 (HHV6).

Aim. Study of the clinical and virological effectiveness, tolerability, and safety of the medicinal product inosine pranobex in long COVID-19 patients with HHV6 reactivation.

Materials and methods. Anamnestic, clinical, general laboratory, biochemical, molecular genetic studies, and statistical analysis were performed. The study group consisted of 20 patients with long COVID-19 and HHV6 reactivation, 55.0% women and 45.0% men. The control group consisted of 20 practically healthy people of respective age and sex.

Results. The prevalence of HHV6 reactivation in patients with long COVID-19 amounted to 100.0% regardless of the severity of COVID-19 history. The most frequent complaints of patients were increased fatigue in 100.0%; sleep disturbances, constant fatigue, and increased sweating in 85.0%; impaired mobility, headaches, and loss of smell in 80.0%, and others. In patients with long COVID-19 and HHV6 reactivation, changes in the complete blood count were determined compared to the control group of healthy individuals. After the treatment, the patient’s condition and laboratory parameters improved significantly. The clinical effectiveness of treatment with inosine pranobex for 12 weeks generally amounted to 60.1%, and the virological efficacy was 79.4%. Long-term treatment of patients with long COVID-19 and active phase of chronic HHV6 infection with the drug inosine pranobex demonstrated safety and good tolerability.

Conclusions. Treatment of long COVID-19 patients with HHV-6 reactivation with the drug inosine pranobex demonstrated 60.1% clinical and 79.1% virological efficacy, good tolerability, and safety.

LINK PDF

 

The drug used is also known as Imunovir. I remember some trials for ME in the past? And also that it's very expensive in the US and dirt cheap in Europe. And that a member here had bad results?

 

The virologist I saw did a study with Dr. Byron Hyde on 36 CFS patients who took Imunovir and found that they felt 'less fatigued'.

I on the other hand had a complete relapse after only taking it for less than 3 weeks, it changed the course of my illness to worse when I was feeling 80-90% improved at the time.

 

Seems like they've had a pilot study beforehand?

And a review that seems to address this (haven't read).

 

I don't see any indication in the text that that's the case:

 

@forestglip the abstract makes it look like it:

 

Hmm, yeah maybe. They didn't make it clear enough in the full text if that is the case.

Edit: Ah actually, it seems they do say they confirm the patients were positive to be included:

 

The pdf also says this:

Either way, they should have been less ambiguous.

 

Thanks yeah, missed it the first time. So I don't think the decrease in HHV6 is very meaningful here without a long COVID control group. Their patient group might just select for people who had a temporary flare-up of the virus and at the follow-up they were back to normal - regression to the mean. Just glancing at the study @rapidboson posted above, their followup proportion seems to almost exactly match the proportion from the other observational study. I think 45% positive for HHV6 here, and in the other study I get 39 positive out of 88 total = 44.3%.