Dr. Conca reports that using low doses of radiation to treat the deadly inflammation of pneumonia, particularly viral pneumonia like that caused by COVID-19, was used during the first half of the 20th century with good results. And it may have a role in mitigating today’s pandemic. Most discussions about the COVID-19 global pandemic, caused by the new coronavirus SARS-CoV-2, involve how to prevent spreading of the disease, as they should be.
The apparent 3% average case fatality rate of COVID-19 patients is quite large, although spotty testing makes it difficult to gauge. By comparison, seasonal flu generally kills far fewer than 1% of those infected. But it’s COVID-19’s contagiousness and increasing fatality rates with age that are so worrisome - increasing to 8% for patients aged 70 to 79 and 14.8% for those aged 80 and over.
Using radiation may sound unusual, but it is currently being tested in clinical trials - using low doses of radiation to control lung inflammation. This method is being explored because severe COVID-19 cases causes cytokine release syndrome, also known as a cytokine storm Such a storm is a deadly uncontrolled systemic inflammatory response of the body’s immune system resulting from the release of great amounts of pro-inflammatory cytokines, which act as a major factor in producing acute respiratory distress syndrome, which is what kills.It’s why we need ventilators and ICU beds so badly, and why this pandemic threatens to overwhelm our hospital systems.
Researchers are trying to target the pneumonia and stop or lessen the cytokine storm that leads to such high mortality rates. The problem is so acute that we seem willing to try anything to get a handle on this pandemic. Dr. Mohan Doss, a Medical Physicist from Philadelphia, and Dr. Javad Mortazavi of Shiraz University of Medical Sciences, also looked at historic studies of low doses of radiation in the hopes of improving the immune response and reduce inflammation in COVID-19 patients (see Doss 2020 and Ghadimi-Moghadam et al., 2020).
These studies reported treating pneumonia patients by giving a very modest X-ray dose of about 0.3 Gy to the lungs. The average cure rate for all the studies was 83%. In one study by J. P. Rousseau et al., X-ray treatments of pneumonia patients dropped the fatality rate from 28% to 6%. Most importantly for COVID-19, the radiation treatment was for viral pneumonia patients who had not responded to sulfonamides. COVID-19 causes viral pneumonia.
While antiviral drugs, anti-inflammatory drugs and statins are systemic drugs that affect the whole body, radiation treatments are able to specifically target the lungs where the inflammation occurs. None of the radiation doses used are at levels that cause significant health risks by themselves, and all are close to the range of Earth background radiation levels. Separately, Mortazavi focused on low-level radiation treatments as a way to not mutate the virus into more drug-resistant forms.
This may strike you as counter-intuitive but, contrary to popular opinion and old wives’ tales, radiation is one of the weakest mutagens, and carcinogens, there is. Low-dose radiation does not directly target the microbe, it targets the host's immune reaction. Not so for biochemicals such as antivirals and antibiotics. These work directly against the offending microbes. If they clear each and every last virion, or infective particle, then they are successful. But if they do not exterminate every last virion, there is a selective pressure that can cause them to evolve through mutations, strongly favoring survivors. It’s why we have so many drug-resistant infections. In contrast to antiviral drugs, a dose of X-rays cannot exert a significant selective pressure on the SARS-CoV-2 virus and hence does not lead to resistance. As we try lots of possible solutions to rein in the coronavirus SARS-CoV-2, we need to use every tool we have, and low-dose radiation therapy may be an important one. It would be unethical not to investigate this approach as thousands are still dying every day from this pandemic and a vaccine is a long ways off.
[Read all of Dr. Conca's article. It fills in the details that the above summary does not contain.]
Original working URL: https://www.forbes.com/sites/jamesconca/2020/05/13/researchers-explore-low-doses-of-radiation-to-treat-severe-coronavirus-cases/#232bfdc71454
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