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A new study indicates (with a very small samples of patients) that low dose radiation can actually help someone get over a coronavirus infection sooner. Mercer Island Dr. Gordon Cohen joined Seattle’s Morning News to discuss.

“It’s not a double-blind randomized trial, but rather it’s a small group of patients,” Dr. Cohen described. “It was actually five patients in a single institution, but they were treated with whole lung radiation — they were 64 to 94 year-old nursing home residents, so these were the worst possible patients at the highest risk — and within 24 hours of receiving a single radiation treatment … three of the patients were able to come off of oxygen and be at room air and four of patients had improvement in their chest X rays.”

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“So basically, within five days, all these very old patients were markedly improved. There was only one of the patients who didn’t really improve.”

How does the coronavirus radiation treatment work exactly?

“One of the problems that causes patients to be so sick is they have something called cytokine storm. Cytokines are inflammatory mediators that our body makes and releases, and if you get overwhelmed with an infection, your body releases an excessive number of these cytokine and this is what makes people so sick,” he said.

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“What the low dose radiation appears to do is it reduces or completely eliminates the cytokine storm and allows the patient to otherwise recover from just a simple viral infection. I think we can say at this point that low dose radiation appears to be safe, and it does show early promise of of being effective. But it’s going to require a larger double-blind randomized clinical trial. What’s encouraging is that it worked on these really old patients who were really at high risk of dying.”

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