rhG-CSF therapy refers to the treatment with colony stimulating factor of human recombinant granulocyte. “More than 80% of covid-19 patients have low lymphocytes, and low lymphocytes often indicate serious conditions and poor prognosis.” The first authors of this study, Ling Chen, chief physician and Weijie Guan, associate research fellow from Guangzhou Institute of Respiratory Disease told the reporter, rhG-CSF had been widely used in clinical treatment, but there has been few researches to confirm whether this treatment for patients was was effective and safe, which was accompanied by a significant decline in lymphocyte count. “Therefore, we’ve carried out clinical experiments with multiple centers and random reference among the covid-19 patients with a lack of lymphocyte.” Cheng introduced, the breakthrough was published online at the international top medical journal JAMA Internal Medicine on September 10.

The study carried out rhg-GSF in three fixed hospitals to accept covid-19 patients in China, which had collected 200 cases that met the research scheme. Later, they were divided into treatment group (conventional treatment + rhG-CSF) and reference group (conventional treatment group), and were observed for 21 days.

The research results indicated that the two groups showed no distinctive differences in the clinical improvement time (12 days vs 13 days), but the rhG-CSF treatment group was significantly lower than the reference group in the proportion of critical symptoms such as acute respiratory distress, sepsis and shock (2% vs 15%). In addition, the mortality of the treatment group was obviously lower than that of the reference group (2% vs 10%). The higher mortality of the reference group should be related with the fact that nearly half of the patients was less than 400/μl among the patients.