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Review
. 2020 Sep 1;75(9):2376-2380.
doi: 10.1093/jac/dkaa191.

Rationale of a loading dose initiation for hydroxychloroquine treatment in COVID-19 infection in the DisCoVeRy trial

Minh Patrick Lê  1   2 , Nathan Peiffer-Smadja  3   4 , Jeremie Guedj  4 , Nadège Néant  4 , France Mentré  4 , Florence Ader  5   6 , Yazdan Yazdanpanah  3   4 , Gilles Peytavin  1   4
Affiliations
Review

Rationale of a loading dose initiation for hydroxychloroquine treatment in COVID-19 infection in the DisCoVeRy trial

Minh Patrick Lê et al. J Antimicrob Chemother. .

Abstract

Around the world, several dose regimens of hydroxychloroquine have been used for COVID-19 infection treatment, with the objective of identifying a short-term course. Hydroxychloroquine was found to decrease the viral replication in a concentration-dependent manner in vitro and to be more active when added prior to the viral challenge. A loading dose is used to rapidly attain a target drug concentration, which is usually considered as approximately the steady-state concentration. With a loading dose, the minimum effective concentration is reached much more rapidly than when using only the maintenance dose from the start. Thus, we propose a hydroxychloroquine sulphate dose regimen of 400 mg twice daily at Day 1 then 400 mg once daily from Day 2 to Day 10. We aim to evaluate this in the C-20-15 DisCoVeRy trial.

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