Can Your Blood Pressure Drugs Protect You from Severe COVID-19?

Statins or cholesterol lowering drugs can also help reduce the risk of severe COVID-19 disease, found a new study.

Commonly used cholesterol-reducing drugs can help reduce COVID-19 severity, says a new study published in the journal PLOS ONE . Researchers from the University of California San Diego have confirmed through their study that statin users are less likely to experience adverse outcomes from COVID-19.

"When faced with this virus at the beginning of the pandemic, there was a lot of speculation surrounding certain medications that affect the body’s ACE2 receptor, including statins, and whether they may influence COVID-19 risk. At the time, we thought that statins might inhibit SARS-CoV-2 infection through their known anti-inflammatory effects and binding capabilities, which could potentially stop the progression of the virus," explained the lead study author Lori Daniels regarding the motive behind this study.

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‘Use of statin or any hypertension medication was associated with a 32% reduced risk of death from COVID-19. This benefit was particularly significant among statin users with a history of heart disease or high blood pressure.’

Statins are the most popular class of cholesterol-lowering drugs. They block a component required by our body to make cholesterol. According to the Centers for Disease Control, ninety-three percent of patients who use a cholesterol-lowering drug use statins.

The research team collected anonymized medical records of 10,541 patients hospitalized with COVID-19 through September 2020 at 104 US hospitals from the American Heart Association’s COVID-19 Cardiovascular Disease (CVD) Registry. Using this data, they performed an advanced analysis by taking comorbidities, socioeconomic status, and hospital factors into consideration as these might also influence the disease severity.

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Statistical analyses were used to compare the efficacy of statins and other anti-hypertension medications in reducing the severity of COVID-19.

After analyzing the efficacies of hypertension medications, the team found that

Coronavirus
Coronaviruses infect animals, humans, and birds. Human coronaviruses, such as SARS, MERS, and 2019-nCoV cause respiratory distress and even death. The S protein is the infectious agent of the virus.

• The use of statin or any hypertension medication was associated with a 32% reduced risk of death from COVID-19

• Patients who used statin before hospital admission for COVID-19 had more than 50% reduction in risk of developing severe COVID-19 infection

Post-COVID Syndrome
Post-COVID complications are the conditions that develop weeks after recovering from COVID-19

• In terms of reducing COVID-19 severity, a significant number of benefits were experienced by statin users with a history of heart disease or high blood pressure

"As with any observational study, we cannot say for certain that the associations we describe between statin use and reduced severity of COVID-19 infection are definitely due to the statins themselves; however, we can now say with very strong evidence that they may play a role in substantially lowering a patient’s risk of death from COVID-19," concluded Daniels.

Source-Medindia