A META-ANALYSIS OF AZITHROMYCIN USE IN PATIENTS DURING THE COVID-19 PANDEMIC

Zhuang Han^1,*, Hengfen Hu²

¹School of Public Health, Wuhan University of Science and Technology, Wuhan , China, 430065 - ²Hunan Environment Biological Polytechnic, Hengyang, China, 421005

Objective: To based on M eta analysis of azithromycin use in patients during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Methods: The search period was determined by searching the literature for azithromycin treatment in patients with novel coronavirus through Cochrane Library, Embase, PubMed, Chinese biomedical literature database, CNKI, Chinese journal full-text database, Wanfang, Vipu, and other databases. The quality evaluation of the searched literature was performed (Jadad quality score), and the Meta-analysis of the literature data was performed using the Stata software.

Results: A total of four articles reported the treatment of azithromycin in patients with COVID-19, and the Meta-analysis showed no clinical heterogeneity and statistical heterogeneity among the studies (I²=0%, P=0.88), using a fixed-effect model to incorporate the effect sizes. The clinical effect of the observed group was not different from the control group [OR=0.97,95% CI (0.86,1.09), P=0.57]. None of the four azithromycin articles with a clinical effect, as the effect index was statistically significant (P>0.05), suggesting no publication bias.

Conclusion: During the COVID-19 pandemic, azithromycin use did not significantly improve the clinical efficacy, so azithromycin medication is recommended only for patients with associated bacterial infections.