Suzy Cohen: OCD drug Fluvoxamine reduces cytokines
We’ve all been hearing about something called a cytokine storm, and how elevations in various cytokines contribute to fatal outcomes with COVID-19. It’s not the pathogen per se; we can and do coexist with many organisms. It’s the flooding in the body of cytokines in response to the pathogen that causes symptoms and complications.
The role of cytokines has been studied for decades because when they fall out of balance, you see exacerbation in symptoms, and this occurs for all diseases. Cytokines have a normal value, and anything above or below will cause health challenges.
Cytokines are not new. You hear of them frequently because we now understand that managing them is the key to staying healthy. The word “cytokine” refers to a protein that you make in your body. Cytokines are created by certain immune (and non-immune) cells, and each protein has its own individual effect on your immune system. Some cytokines are known to stimulate the immune system to make it fight harder, while others slacken it to prevent self-directed autoimmune assault. There are various types of cytokine classifications, too. We have lymphokines, chemokines, interleukins (IL), interferons and tumor necrosis factor (TNF).
I don’t want to get too far away from the topic at hand, which is fluvoxamine, so let me just tell you outright that this drug is known to reduce certain cytokines — and the strange part of all this is that its real claim to fame is for obsessive compulsive disorder!
Noodle that for a minute! The famous OCD drug reduces some cytokines, and therefore might help people with COVID and long-haulers. It can reduce the amount of histamine that gets dumped from mast cells. Because Fluvoxamine reduces serotonin from concentrating in platelets, it can help reduce blood-clot formation. This was noticed in patients taking the drug all the way back in 2011, and they had reduced risk of clot formation.
Fluvoxamine is an orally administered medication that was invented in Belgium in 1983 at a pharmaceutical company and then became FDA-approved here in the USA as Luvox in 1994. It raises serotonin in the human body like the SSRI drugs, but it is not FDA-approved for the treatment of any infection, even though the Lancet published positive findings from the TOGETHER trial — this study is available online.
The medication may cause serious side effects, the most challenging of which are seizures, cardiac problems due to low sodium (hyponatremia), suicidal ideation and insomnia. There are others, of course, but these are the most challenging to deal with. Furthermore, the medication interacts with a lot of medications, including popular ones such as warfarin, lithium, antidepressants and stimulants for ADHD.
Nevertheless, many infectious disease specialists and neurologists capitalize on fluvoxamine’s lesser known (off-label) benefit to reduce cytokines!
Fluvoxamine is not for everyone; please speak to your pharmacist and physician to see if it’s right for you. I have a longer version of this article in case you are interested. Please just sign up for my free newsletter at suzycohen.com and I’ll email it to you next week.
This article originally appeared on The Gainesville Sun: Suzy Cohen: OCD drug Fluvoxamine reduces cytokines
