Chloroquine use linked to serious psychiatric side effects: study

The authors have published the review in BioScience Trends.

Chloroquine, an anti-malarial drug has been approved as an emergency treatment for the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) in the United States and Europe. Contradictory results have been reported about their efficacy against COVID-19 and potentially serious adverse effects(AEs), such as cardiac, kidney, liver, and ophthalmologic effects, have been reported in studies.

In this study, the researchers aiming to investigate neuropsychiatric adverse events (AEs) using a large self-reporting database, conducted a disproportionality analysis for the detection of neuropsychiatric AE signals associated with the use of chloroquine (or hydroxychloroquine), reported to FDA Adverse Event Reporting System (FAERS) database between the fourth quarter of 2012 and the fourth quarter of 2019

As the incidence of psychiatric adverse effects with the use of chloroquine is till date, unclear, in the absence of high-quality, randomized placebo-controlled trials of its safety, a data-based review analysis was conducted for the detection of neuropsychiatric AE signals associated with the use of chloroquine (or hydroxychloroquine).

The key findings have been highlighted below.

• The study sample included 2,389,474 AE cases, among which 520 cases developed neuropsychiatric AE following the use of chloroquine
• Exposure to chloroquine was associated with a statistically significant high reporting of amnesia, delirium, hallucinations, depression, and loss of consciousness, (lower 95% confidence interval of the adjusted ROR > 1), although the degree of increase in their ROR was limited.
• There was no statistically significant high reporting of any other neuropsychiatric AE, including suicide, psychosis, confusion, and agitation.

Researchers believed that Chloroquine-induced psychiatric symptoms can occur in patients with no familial predisposition or personal mental disorders. The frequency of these symptoms does not seem to be related to the cumulative dose or the duration of treatment.

" However, the onset of psychosis and other potentially serious effects is usually sudden, and while this typically occurs during the early days to weeks of treatment, there may be delayed recognition of more subtle psychiatric symptoms, which may persist even after stopping the drug. While such persistence has been attributed to chloroquine's extremely long half-life (10–30 days), long-term psychiatric effects extending beyond the drug's persistence in the body cannot be excluded." authors wrote.

For more details click on the link: 10.5582/bst.2020.03082