Survival impact of previous statin therapy in patients hospitalized with COVID-19

INTRODUCTION: Statin therapy might have a beneficial prognostic effect in patients with COVID-19, given its immunomodulative, anti-inflammatory and anti-atherosclerotic properties. Our purpose was to test this hypothesis by using the COVID-19 registry of a Spanish university hospital. METHODS: We conducted a single-center, observational and retrospective study in which hospitalized patients with COVID-19 diagnosed by PCR between March 2020 and October 2020 were included. By means of logistic regression, we designed a propensity score to estimate the likelihood that a patient would receive statin treatment prior to admission. We compared the survival of COVID-19 patients with and without statin treatment by means of Cox regression with inverse probability of treatment weighting (IPTW). The median follow-up was 406 days. RESULTS: We studied 1122 hospitalized patients with COVID-19, whose median age was 71 years and of which 488 (43.5%) were women. 451 (40.2%) patients received statins before admission. In the IPTW survival analysis, prior statin treatment was associated with a significant reduction in mortality (HR: 0.76; 95% CI: 0.59–0.97). The greatest benefit of previous statin therapy was seen in subgroups of patients with coronary artery disease (HR: 0.32; 95% CI: 0.18–0.56) and extracardiac arterial disease (HR: 0.45; 95% CI: 0.28–0.73). CONCLUSIONS: Our study showed a significant association between previous treatment with statins and lower mortality in hospitalized patients with COVID-19. The observed prognostic benefit was greater in patients with previous coronary or extracardiac atherosclerotic disease.