All you need to know about Plasma Therapy
New Delhi: Plasma Therapy is being used by doctors to treat Covid patients. On Friday Delhi Chief Minister Arvind Kejriwal announced how four people have recovered after the plasma therapy.
But what is plasma therapy and how was it effective?
Dr. Ahmad Alam Senior General Medicine Consultant at Apollo Telehealth explained the therapy saying that it has been used in other diseases like the Spanish flu in the 1918 and swine flu among other major infections. "Plasma therapy is not a new therapy. It has been tried during the Spanish plasma and has been done during Swine flu and other diseases. These days it is commonly used in baldness. In plasma therapy you extract the fresh plasma of the recently recovered plasma patients and then it was transfused to severely ill patients who were on ventilators and people who had severe symptoms of Covid and they noticed that there was significant improvement in their physical symptoms, which is the cough, cold and respiratory issues. So, there was significant improvement," he told the correspondent.
How effective is it and what are the effects?
Even though the process has been successful Dr. Vivek who is a scientist at All India Institute of Medical Sciences (AIIMS) said that it has some connotations. "The therapy did show randomized control, better analysis, however there are certain limitations and there are some situations which cannot be generalized. One condition is that the person needs to be infected and second that after the therapy whether the patient has been conventionally recovered," he added. Dr. Vivek further explained that when it comes to Covid, when the patient is recovered, meaning whether he has received some paracetamol and after 14 days becomes disinfected and is discharged or is reported negative. "Meaning the patient doesn't have a virus. At the moment this is being used on severe patients but the important thing is that it can be useful for those whose immunity is very low. For those whose immunity is well this can work as platonic therapy," he added.
On what conditions is it used?
Dr. Vivek says that the patient needs to be negative and secondly the plasma that the experts are extracting should have rich number of antibodies. "Higher amount of anti-bodies need to be given to the patient. If the result is not good, it could mean that the amount of antibody given to the patient is not good," said Dr. Vivek. Meanwhile, he said that as the number of patients is increasing a plasma bank needs to be created. "My suggestion is to keep a bank of plasmas, which can be useful, because the number of patients coming in is more than the recovery rate. So, if we bank this then we can balance it out. Young people who have recovered must offer their plasmas to be stored," he added. Explaining antibodies and why it is necessary, Dr. Ahmad said, "In the recently healed patients of Covid they have high number of antibodies. The plasma contains rich number of these antibodies. After covid, the body develops a memory against this disease. An antibody is created inside the body. When you have a recovered patient this acts as a mechanism."
