Medical Xpress reports that results from a study Cleveland Clinic indicate that melatonin may be of value in treating COVID. The urgency of the need to treat COVID has resulted in a “fall surge”, where currently available drugs are being assessed for repurposing in treating the pandemic.
The study used artificial intelligence to sift through patient data to uncover possible candidates for use in treatment, and turned up a surprising one – melatonin. The patient data showed that taking melatonin resulted in a 30% decreased chance of contracting COVID after adjusting for confounding variables, with an even greater decreased chance of 52% in African Americans.
The study sifted through clinical manifestations and pathologies COVID and other diseases had in common. They measured the proximity between host genes/proteins and those well-associated with 64 other diseases across several types of disease, with closer proximity indicating a higher likelihood of pathological associations between the diseases.
One of their findings was that proteins associated with respiratory distress syndrome and sepsis, two major mortality causes in severe COVID patients, were strongly connected with multiple SARS-CoV-2 proteins.
“Recent studies suggest that COVID-19 is a systematic disease impacting multiple cell types, tissues and organs, so knowledge of the complex interplays between the virus and other diseases is key to understanding COVID-19-related complications and identifying repurposable drugs,” said Dr. Cheng. “Our study provides a powerful, integrative network medicine strategy to predict disease manifestations associated with COVID-19 and facilitate the search for an effective treatment.”
