SPOKANE, Wash. — A study done by a team of researchers at the Cleveland Clinic found that the sleep aid melatonin may help prevent illness from COVID-19.
Dr. Feixiong Cheng, one of the lead researchers on the study, said his team set out with the goal of finding something already approved by the FDA that could help in the fight against the virus.
"The idea is, we try to identify the drug, FDA originally approved for another disease, that may potentially treat the COVID-19," Cheng said.
The study found that melatonin use is "strongly associated with a 28% reduced likelihood" of a positive COVID-19 test. For African Americans, the reduction in likelihood goes up to 52 percent. The study adjusted for things such as sex and age, among other variables.
The team decided to test a wide range of FDA-approved drugs and supplements, about 3,000 by Cheng's estimate. The team was looking for one that would block COVID-19 proteins from interacting with proteins in the body.
Melatonin had positives that others on the list didn't.
"We pick the melatonin because like you mentioned, melatonin drug is much cheaper, and we see the availability. We can easily buy from the OTC from the market. And the beauty is that melatonin is the hormone generated by our body. It means the toxicity factor for melatonin is very low," Cheng said.
The next steps for the possibility of melatonin seeing widespread use, according to Cheng, involved getting a large enough recruitment of patients for the next phases of the study.
Cheng is confident this will happen in not-too-distant future.
"Our timeline is hopeful we can get it in the next few months, or maybe half a year, we can get the final results, you know, for this trial," Cheng said.
Other drugs or substances have shown promise too, Cheng said, including vitamin D and a breast cancer drug. However, melatonin is much more widely available and doesn't have harmful side effects that cancer drugs may have.