Statin Treatments May Moderate COVID-19 Mortality

During the COVID-19 pandemic, it has been debated whether statins influence the risk of death from COVID-19. Researchers at Karolinska Institutet in Sweden conducted an extensive population study to date to answer that question.

This new, extensive study found statin treatment was associated with a moderately lower risk of COVID-19 mortality (hazard ratio (HR), 0.88; 95% CI, 0.79 to 0.97), after accounting for a series of preexisting health conditions and other factors.

And the association was corroborated by sensitivity analyses and did not vary substantially across risk groups.

The study was published in the journal PLOS Medicine on October 14, 2021, says 'Statin treatment had a modest negative association with COVID-19 mortality.'

'While this finding needs confirmation from randomized clinical trials, it supports the continued use of statin treatment for medical prevention according to current recommendations also during the COVID-19 pandemic.'

Statins are a recommended and common intervention for preventing cardiovascular events by reducing lipoprotein cholesterol levels in the blood.

Statins are used to lower the cholesterol level – the lipid count – in the blood and are standard preventative treatment in patients at high risk of cardiovascular events.

Earlier studies have not provided an unequivocal answer and have often suffered from the limitation that they have only included hospital inpatients, said these researchers.

Using data from Swedish health registers, a cohort of 963,876 residents of Stockholm, Sweden, were followed from March 2020 until mid-November 2020.

"All in all, our findings support the continued use of statins for conditions such as cardiovascular disease and high levels of blood lipids in line with current recommendations during the COVID-19 pandemic," says co-first author Viktor Ahlqvist, a doctoral student at the Department of Global Public Health, Karolinska Institutet.

One limitation of the study concerns the use of prescription data without the possibility of checking individual drug use. The researchers were also unable to control for risk factors such as smoking and high BMI, only diagnosed health status.

The researchers received no financing for the study.