A major trial of high-dose blood thinners in critically ill hospitalized Covid-19 patients is being temporarily halted because there appears to be no benefit to the treatment and there may be some harm, the trial’s leaders announced Tuesday. The independent monitoring board that called for the trial to be paused did not announce what possible harms it had found. High doses of anticoagulants are known to cause uncontrollable bleeding — in places including the inside of the skull, which can be very dangerous. The trial’s leaders are urgently trying to spread word that the trial has been paused, as some hospitals are still aggressively putting their intensive-care patients on high doses of anticoagulants in the belief that the benefits outweigh the risks, whereas the opposite may be true. “We need to widely advertise this pause in the trial because of the potential for harm,” said Dr. Matthew D. Neal, a surgeon and intensive-care specialist at the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center who is leading one of many teams in the trial.

Source: New York Times December 23, 2020 03:33 UTC