Two common blood pressure drugs are not associated with an increased risk of COVID-19

Research published in the peer-reviewed journal Lancet Digital Health and co – led by a faculty member of the UCLA School of Public Health found that two types of blood pressure drugs are not associated with an increased risk of COVID-19 infection or complications.

The international team co-led by Dr. Marc Suchard, a professor of biostatistics at UCLA School of Fielding, said there was no increased risk for COVID-19 diagnosis, hospitalization, or subsequent complications for users of either angiotensin converting enzyme (ACE) inhibitors, or angiotensin receptor blockers (ARBs). The study, the largest in the world, studied a group of more than 1.1 million patients in the United States and Spain using antihypertensives, researchers said.

COVID-19 results are worse in people with hypertension, and there is still speculation that some anti-inflammatory medications may have side effects. The obvious answer is that ACE and ARB inhibitors are not at higher risk compared to other therapies. “

Marc Suchard, Professor of Biostatistics at UCLA Field School

This real-world evidence, generated through open science methods, supports recent regulatory and clinical recommendations that patients should not discontinue ACE inhibitor or ARB therapy because of concerns about increased risk of COVID -19.

“Based on our findings, if there is a risk difference, it is marginal and it would be very challenging to make further development outside of such a large international study,” Suchard said.

The team included more than 30 scholars from more than 20 different universities and research institutes, including UCLA, Columbia University, Oxford University, Yale University, and the University of Dundee in the United Kingdom.

“By comparing people exposed to an ACE inhibitor and ARB against people taking other antihypertensives, alone or in combination, using two methods across three databases the 1280 study generated a comparison to safety of these drugs, yielding very consistent results, “said co-author Dr. Daniel Morales, research member of the Wellcome Trust at the University of Dundee.

The work was carried out under the auspices of the Observational Health Data Services and Informatics (OHDSI) community. OHDSI is a global, multi-stakeholder interdisciplinary collaboration that aims to capture the value of health data through large-scale analysis and an open science approach to generate evidence that informs health decisions better and better care.

“Open science and collaboration are the hallmarks of the OHDSI community, and have never been more important than early in this pandemic, when we all knew very little about urgent issues such as antihypertensive risks around COVID. -19, “said co-author Dr. George Hripcsak, chairman of the Columbia Department of Biomedical Information, the coordination center for OHDSI, and a member of the Columbia Institute of Data Science. “Our community worked together for years to establish the high-level analytical tools that set the course for these studies, and our belief in international collaboration through open science allowed us the reliable COVID patient data, generate this reproduction that informs and supports critical decisions. with this and other issues challenging our healthcare community. “

Methods:

The team conducted a systematic and comprehensive functional-comparative active cohort study enabled by a common data model. The protocol for the Covid-ACE International Prohibition Use and Safety (ICARIUS) studies was drafted and conducted by an international team of clinical, academic, government and industry stakeholders through the network of Observational Health Data Sciences and Informatics ( OHDSI).