Medication for high blood pressure – hypertension – could improve Covid-19 survival rates and reduce the severity of infection in patients with the condition, a new study suggests.
Researchers used data from 19 studies involving more than 28,000 patients taking antihypertensives, a class of drugs that are used to treat hypertension. They found that the risk of severe Covid-19 illness and death was reduced for patients with high blood pressure who were taking Angiotensin-Converting Enzyme inhibitors (ACEi) or Angiotensin Receptor Blockers (ARB).
Covid-19 patients with high blood pressure who were taking the medications were 0.67 times less likely to have a critical or fatal outcome than those who were not, according to the study published in Current Atherosclerosis Reports.
Lead researcher Dr Vassilios Vassiliou, from the University of East Anglia’s Norwich Medical School, said: “We know that patients with cardiovascular diseases are at particular risk of severe Covid-19 infection. But at the start of the pandemic, there was concern that specific medications for high blood pressure could be linked with worse outcomes for Covid-19 patients. We wanted to find out what the impact of these medications is for people with Covid-19.”
Critical events
The team compared data from Covid-19 patients who were taking the two medications with those who were not. The study focused on whether patients experienced critical events – admission to intensive care and invasive or non-invasive ventilation – and death.
Dr Vassiliou said: “We found that a third of Covid-19 patients with high blood pressure and a quarter of patients overall were taking an ACEi/ARBs. This is likely due to the increasing risk of infection in patients with co-morbidities such as cardiovascular diseases, hypertension and diabetes.
“But the really important thing that we showed was that there is no evidence that these medications might increase the severity of Covid-19 or risk of death. On the contrary, we found that there was a significantly lower risk of death and critical outcomes, so they might in fact have a protective role, particularly in patients with hypertension.”
‘Caution should be exercised’
Although Dr Vassiliou said the research provides “substantial evidence” to recommend continued use of these medications if the patients were taking them already, he said the team was not able to address whether starting such tablets acutely in patients with Covid-19 might improve their prognosis.
Stephen Evans, Professor of Pharmacoepidemiology at the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine, said: “We do not yet understand how the SARS COV-2 virus is affected by these drugs, so caution should definitely be exercised before recommending their use for prevention of bad outcomes in Covid-19.”
