Impact of in-hospital statin use on mortality in COVID-19 patients from a majority African American population.
Nitish Sood, Dhairya Shukla, Pranjal Mishra and 4 others
PMID 38184934WHAT IT FOUND
Statin use in hospitalized COVID-19 patients was not associated with lower mortality compared with no in-hospital statin use.
It also was not associated with differences in need for ICU care, ventilation, intubation duration, ICU stay, or dialysis.
Key findings
01In-hospital statin use was not associated with lower all-cause mortality: 17.7% died among statin recipients and 15.1% among patients without in-hospital statin use.
02Statin use did not significantly differ for need for ICU care (29.6% vs 24.4%), length of ICU stay (11.7 vs 9.3 days), need for mechanical ventilator (19.9% vs 18.4%), duration of intubation (7.7 vs 7.0 days), or need for dialysis (9.1% vs 5.8%).
03After multivariable adjustment, neither in-hospital nor pre-admission statin use was associated with mortality.
STILL TO COME
How it was doneWhat they foundWhat it means for RNs
Read the rest of this summary
You get three full summaries a month, free, and we do not ask for a card. Search, the TL;DRs and your library stay unlimited either way.
What it does not show
The study was a retrospective chart review, not a randomized trial, so patients who received statins may differ from patients who did not. Statin users were older and had more hypertension and diabetes, likely reflecting the reasons statins were prescribed. The study did not know how long patients had been on statins before admission. Other treatments given during hospitalization were not controlled for, which could confound the statin effect. The outcomes measured were mortality, ICU care, ventilator use, intubation duration, ICU stay and dialysis; inflammatory markers and thromboembolic events were not measured. Most patients were African American, so the results may not apply to populations with different racial or ethnic composition, and the study may have been underpowered for non-African American patients.
Declared interests
No specific funding agency grant; the authors declared no conflicts of interest.
The easy way to misread this
Do not conclude that statins should be started or stopped for hospitalized COVID-19 patients based on this paper. It was a retrospective chart review, not a randomized trial, and it did not control for other treatments, so it cannot prove that statins are ineffective or harmful.