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Melatonin may decrease risk for and aid treatment of Covid-19

openheart.bmj.com

17 points by cachecrab 4 years ago · 15 comments

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denysonique 4 years ago

What if it is not melatonin itself, but the fact that it helps to get more sleep which generally boosts the immune system and has anti-inflamatory effects.

Sleep length/quality should have been taken into account.

Have scientists rediscovered the importance of sleep?

  • TrevorJ 4 years ago

    This is, of course, the right question to ask. The good thing is, we can still reasonably act on this data while we wait for more studies to disentangle the cause/correlation relationship. Melatonin is well tolerated, and also produced endogenously, so the risk/reward on this treatment is in our favor.

  • dangom 4 years ago

    Well, we could turn your question around. What if it is not sleep itself, but the fact that it is related to the release of melatonin which potentially mediates immune system responses and inflammation?

    The paper offers interesting hypothesis into why this could be the case.

  • smt88 4 years ago

    The study is of intubated patients, I think they're asleep a lot...

    But I'm sure poor sleep habits are a risk factor for severe Covid anyway.

  • nikolay 4 years ago

    And that's not what melatonin does.

criticaltinker 4 years ago

> A retrospective analysis of 791 intubated patients with COVID-19 has found that, after adjustment for pertinent demographics and comorbidities, those treated with melatonin had a markedly lower risk for mortality (HR: 0.131, 95% CI: 0.076 to 0.223)—suggestive of a profound anti-inflammatory benefit.

> Moreover, recent epidemiology suggests that melatonin usage may reduce the risk for contracting COVID-19. A recent retrospective study, examining data from 26 799 subjects in a COVID-19 registry and using propensity score matching to account for a range of covariates, found that current supplementation with melatonin was associated with a significant 28% reduction in risk for serologically detectible COVID-19 infection. Among Black Americans, this reduction in risk was a remarkable 52% (OR=0.48, 95% CI 0.31 to 0.75).

> More generally, it might be feasible to define a simple nutraceutical regimen that could reduce the risk for COVID-19 and a range of other viral infections. There is growing evidence, both case–control and ecologic, that replete vitamin D status not only markedly improves the clinical course of COVID-19, but also is associated with decreased risk for clinically detectible infection.

> COVID-19 epidemiology also suggests that higher zinc status is associated with both a better clinical course in this disorder and lower risk for infection.42 43 Especially in the elderly, who are more prone to poor zinc status, zinc supplementation has been found to boost acquired, antigen-specific immunity, while also exerting an anti-inflammatory action; such supplementation of the elderly was associated with a marked decrease in total infections in a 12-month randomised controlled trial.

> Hence, it is not unreasonable to suggest that a supplementation programme incorporating vitamin D, zinc, melatonin and possibly additional nutraceuticals could reduce risk for and aid control of COVID-19 and a range of other viral infections.

Andys 4 years ago

After 12+ months of suffering, melatonin with high dose nicotinic acid totally cured my long covid.

  • Something1234 4 years ago

    Can you provide proof of this or links to research? Making claims like this is counter productive and only helps to empower the antivaxxers.

  • dhirenb 4 years ago

    Can you give some information or links to what was the dosage and frequency?

    • Andys 4 years ago

      Up to 1000mg once per day now, but had to work up slowly over a couple of months, as I wasn't able to tolerate even 10mg at first. You need the "flushing" type of nicotinic acid (it causes your skin to go hot and red for about half an hour, but tolerance of this gradually increases), avoid the "slow release" or "non-flushing" forms of Nicotinic acid. For melatonin I started on 3mg and worked up to 9mg.

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