Chennai: A large-scale study has claimed that using cholesterol-lowering drugs called statins is associated with a lower death rate in patients hospitalised with Covid-19.
The study was published in the journal Cell Metabolism. Statins lower your cholesterol by blocking a substance that the body needs to make cholesterol.
At present, there is no vaccine or specific antiviral drug approved to prevent or treat severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) infection, which causes Covid-19, according to the researchers.
The study showed that mortality risk and other negative outcomes were not increased by combination therapy consisting of statins and blood pressure-lowering drugs called angiotensin-converting enzyme (ACE) inhibitors and angiotensin II receptor blockers (ARBs).
The study’s senior author Hongliang Li of Wuhan University in China said, “these results support the safety and potential benefits of statin therapy in hospitalised patients with COVID-19 and provide a rationale for prospective studies to determine whether statins confer protection against COVID-19-associated mortality.”
Li added: “Moreover, our findings represent an important contribution to the accumulating clinical evidence regarding the beneficial or detrimental effects of prescribing ACE inhibitors or ARBs to patients with Covid-19”.
According to researchers, because a vaccine or drugs for COVID-19 will likely not be available for months or even years, repurposing clinically approved therapies might be a more attractive option.
They said statins may serve such a purpose because these drugs slow the progression of lung injury in animals, improve immune cell responses, and strongly reduce inflammation, which is likely responsible for severe COVID-19 complications such as organ damage.
They added that although statins generally have an excellent safety profile in humans, animal studies have shown that they increase the expression of ACE2āthe receptor that SARS-CoV-2 binds to and uses to enter host cells.