Statin use is associated with improved mortality rates among hospitalized COVID-19 patients, according to new findings published in Cell Metabolism.
The study included data from nearly 14,000 COVID-19 patients treated in one of 21 hospitals in Hubei Province, China. More than 1,000 of those patients received statins, and after making key analytical adjustments, the team concluded that the risk for 28-day all-cause mortality was 5.2% for the statin group and 9.4% for the non-statin group.
Statin use was also associated with fewer instances of acute respiratory distress syndrome and fewer patients being admitted to the ICU.
“These results support the safety and potential benefits of statin therapy in hospitalized patients with COVID-19 and provide a rationale for prospective studies to determine whether statins confer protection against COVID-19-associated mortality,” senior author Hongliang Li, department of cardiology at Wuhan University, said in a statement. “Moreover, our findings represent an important contribution to the accumulating clinical evidence regarding the beneficial or detrimental effects of prescribing angiotensin-converting enzyme (ACE) inhibitors or angiotensin-receptor blockers (ARBs) to patients with COVID-19.”
The researchers emphasized that their study does not specifically prove statin use caused these improvements in care—but they do “support the notion that the risk of COVID-19 mortality is not increased by using ACE inhibitors or ARBS in combination with statin treatment.”
“Although these data do provide supportive evidence for the safety of statins or the combination of statins with ACE inhibitors or ARBs for treatment in patients with COVID-19, further randomized controlled trials to prospectively explore the efficacy of statins on COVID-19 outcomes appear justified,” Li said in the same statement.
The full Cell Metabolism study is available here.
Michael has more than 16 years of experience as a professional writer and editor. He has written at length about cardiology, radiology, artificial intelligence and other key healthcare topics.