Drugs for high blood pressure don’t appear to make COVID-19 worse
Drugs widely used to treat high blood pressure do not appear to make COVID-19 dangerously worse. Two new studies from China offer the first observational evidence that the drugs do not increase the risk that hospitalized patients with COVID-19 will develop severe complications or die. One study looked at 362 patients with high blood pressure treated at Central Hospital of Wuhan, the city where the initial outbreak occurred. It found no difference between those on the drugs and those not in terms of the severity of the disease and whether a patient survived or died, researchers from the hospital report online April 23 in JAMA Cardiology. The other study followed 1,128 COVID-19 patients with hypertension from nine hospitals in Hubei Provence, where Wuhan is located. It found that the mortality rate was lower for the 188 on the drugs, an international research team reports online April 17 in Circulation Research. The new studies provide reassurance that the drugs “are not associated with harm in patients...