الفهرس | Only 14 pages are availabe for public view |
Abstract The Coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic has robustly affected the global health care and economic systems. The pandemic started in Wuhan, China at the end of 2019. The causative agent is coronavirus-2 (SARS-CoV-2) which belongs to the coronavirus family. The clinical presentation of the disease ranges from a flu-like illness to severe pneumonia and death. Till September 2022, the cumulative number of cases exceeded 600 million worldwide and deaths were more than 6 million. Besides the symptomatic treatment, many anti-inflammatory agents and immune modulators have been repurposed to be utilized in the COVID-19 management. One of these drugs is colchicine which has gained attention as a potential treatment of COVID-19. Colchicine has an anti-inflammatory effect, and it is used in many inflammatory conditions e.g., gout, familial Mediterranean fever, and Behçet’s syndrome. Colchicine is considered safe and affordable with wide availability. These raised the concerns about the effectiveness of colchicine in COVID-19 treatment and the possibility of providing an improvement in the clinical course of the disease. This meta-analysis aimed to assess the evidence of colchicine effectiveness in COVID-19 treatment. The literature was reviewed till May 2022 and yielded 814 articles after ranking the articles according to authors and year of publication. Only articles fulfilling the inclusion criteria were included (8 articles) for further steps of data collection, analysis, and reporting. |