People who take immunosuppressive drugs to prevent organ transplantation or to treat inflammatory or autoimmune diseases do not do worse than others on average when they are hospitalized with COVID- 19, according to a study by researchers at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health.
Estimates suggest that approximately 10 million people are vaccinated in the United States alone. Destruction of the immune system is thought to be a major risk factor for major and lethal COVID-19 as it may allow the SARS-CoV-2 virus to spread undetected in the body. At the same time, there have been reported reports of vaccinated people receiving only moderate or even no-symptoms of COVID-19 suggesting that immunosuppressive drugs may have a protective effect by prescribing prevention of the inflammatory storm sometimes associated with severe COVID-19.
For their study, the researchers analyzed anonymous records of 2,121 hospitalized COVID-19 patients seen at the Johns Hopkins Medicine medical system in Baltimore, MD, and Washington, DC, from March 4 to 29. August 2020. They found that COVID- On average, 19 patients who received a vaccine before being hospitalized COVID-19 had worse COVID-19 outcomes – such as longer hospital stays, hospital deaths, or device use- air – compared to those of their peers who were not vaccinated.
The study was published January 5 in Clinical infectious diseases.
“The COVID pandemic has released a wave of scientific research that will examine who is doing better and who is getting worse with this new virus. We have studied one important group of individuals, those on harmful immunosuppressive medications such as people with a history of organ transplantation or rheumatologic disease and received good news, ”says lead author G. Caleb Alexander, MD, professor in the Department of Epidemiology Bloomberg School at Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health and executive worker.
“There has been concern that immunosuppression may be an important risk factor for severe COVID-19, but we confidently found no trace of that,” said first study author Kayte Andersen, PhD candidate in Department of Epidemiology Bloomberg School.
To date, 83 million cases of COVID-19 have been diagnosed worldwide, and the recent transition of the Northern Hemisphere to cold weather has provided the largest increase in new cases. Many health care systems are struggling to cope with this increase and are trying to allocate limited resources. Knowing the incoming patients are more likely to progress to true COVID-19 helps them do just that. But at least it is a mystery that patients who are “immunocompromised” as a result of immunosuppressive drug treatment are in the highest risk category.
The Johns Hopkins researchers found that 108, or about 5 percent, of the total COVID-19 cases hospitalized in the Baltimore / Washington Johns Hopkins medical network during the study period could be classified as immunosuppressed because they were taking an anti-inflammatory drug such as prednisone or an anti-rejection drug such as tacrolimus after organ transplantation.
These results were obtained after using statistical methods to account for differences between the groups in factors such as age, sex, and non-COVID-19 disease burden that could have avoided the analysis. . But even a raw, undeveloped analysis of the researchers found no statistical association between worse COVID-19 results and immune status.
The researchers are now pursuing an analysis of a much larger dataset of COVID-19 cases across the country, which should allow for more detailed estimates, which may be introducing different risk determinations for different types of immunosuppressive medications. However, they note, the findings in this smaller study show that at least immunosuppression does not appear to be associated with significant adverse growth in COVID-19 results.
“At this stage, there is no indication that people taking antipsychotic drugs should be concerned about other illnesses that have been shown to increase their risk for COVID. -19 big, “Andersen says.