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Quercetin for the treatment of COVID-19 patients: A systematic review and meta-analysis |
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| Authors: | Huzaifa Ahmad Cheema Aruba Sohail Areej Fatima Abia Shahid Muhammad Shahzil Mohammad Ebad Ur Rehman Rehmat Ullah Awan Sampath Chinnam Abdulqadir J. Nashwan |
| Affiliation: | 1. Division of Infectious Diseases, Department of Medicine, King Edward Medical University, Lahore, Pakistan;2. Department of Medicine, Dow University of Health Sciences, Karachi, Pakistan;3. Division of Infectious Diseases, Department of Medicine, King Edward Medical University, Lahore, Pakistan SSM Health St. Anthony Hospital, Oklahoma City, Oklahoma, USA;4. Department of Medicine, Rawalpindi Medical University, Rawalpindi, Pakistan;5. Department of Medicine, Ochsner Rush Medical Center, Meridian, Mississippi, USA;6. Department of Chemistry, M. S. Ramaiah Institute of Technology, Bengaluru, Karnataka, India Visvesvaraya Technological University, Belgaum, Karnataka, India;7. Hamad Medical Corporation, Doha, Qatar |
| Abstract: | Currently approved therapies for COVID-19 are mostly limited by their low availability, high costs or the requirement of parenteral administration by trained medical personnel in an in-hospital setting. Quercetin is a cheap and easily accessible therapeutic option for COVID-19 patients. However, it has not been evaluated in a systematic review until now. We aimed to conduct a meta-analysis to assess the effect of quercetin on clinical outcomes in COVID-19 patients. Various databases including PubMed, the Cochrane Library and Embase were searched from inception until 5 October 2022 and results from six randomized controlled trials (RCTs) were pooled using a random-effects model. All analyses were conducted using RevMan 5.4 with odds ratio (OR) as the effect measure. Quercetin decreased the risk of intensive care unit admission (OR = 0.31; 95% confidence interval (CI) 0.10–0.99) and the incidence of hospitalisation (OR = 0.25; 95% CI 0.10–0.62) but did not decrease the risk of all-cause mortality and the rate of no recovery. Quercetin may be of benefit in COVID-19 patients, especially if administered in its phytosome formulation which greatly enhances its bioavailability but large-scale RCTs are needed to confirm these findings. |
| Keywords: | COVID-19 flavonol quercetin SARS-CoV-2 |