Prolonged higher dose methylprednisolone <i>versus</i> conventional dexamethasone in COVID-19 pneumonia: a randomised controlled trial (MEDEAS).

"Conflict of interest: F. Salton, P. Confalonieri, S. Centanni, M. Mondoni, N. Petrosillo, D. Lacedonia, A. Voza, N. Carpenè, M. Montico, N. Reccardini, G.U. Meduri, B. Ruaro and M. Confalonieri have no conflicts of interest to disclose. P. Bonfanti received personal fees from ViiV Healthcare, Gilead, Janssen, Merck and Pfizer, not related to this work. G. Lapadula received personal fees from ViiV Healthcare and Pfizer, not related to this work."

"Support statement: This material is the result of work supported with the resources of and use of facilities at the University Hospital of Trieste and other participating centres and received no external funding."

"This is a multicentre, open-label RCT (two parallel arms, allocation ratio 1:1) conducted in 26 Italian centres including internal medicine units, infectious diseases units, emergency medicine departments and respiratory high-dependency units. The study was registered at ClinicalTrials.gov (NCT04636671), and approved by the National Ethics Committee (2020-006054-43) and the Italian Medicines Agency (AIFA). The protocol and trial conduct complied with the Declaration of Helsinki, International Council for Harmonisation E6 Guideline for Good Clinical Practice and European regulations. This study is registered at ClinicalTrials.gov with identifier number NCT04636671. Data availability: de-identified participant data will be made available upon motivated request to the corresponding author. The proposed use of the data and analyses must be approved by the Scientific Committee."