All-cause mortality in COVID-19 patients receiving statin therapy: analysis of veterans affairs database cohort study.

Statins have been advocated as a potential treatment for coronavirus disease-2019 (COVID-19) due to its pleotropic properties. The aim of the study was to elucidate the association between antecedent statin exposure and 30-day all-cause mortality, intensive care unit (ICU) admission and hypoxic respiratory failure requiring mechanical ventilation in patients diagnosed with COVID-19. Observational cohort study derived from the VA Corporate Data Warehouse of all veterans tested positive for COVID-19 between January 1st and May 31st, 2020. Antecedent use of statins was defined as a redeemed drug prescription in the 6 months prior to COVID-19 diagnosis. Propensity-matched mixed-effects logistic regression was performed, stratified by statin use. The study population comprised 14,268 patients with COVID-19 (median age 66 years (25th-75th percentile, 53-74), 90.7% men), of whom 7,168 were receiving a prescription for statins. Patients with statin exposure had a greater prevalence of comorbidities and a higher risk of mortality (Odd ratio [OR] 1.52; 95% confidence interval [CI] 1.37-1.68). After adjusting for covariates, statin exposure was not associated with a decreased mortality in the overall cohort by either Cox proportional hazards stratified model (HR 0.99; 95% CI 0.88-1.12) or propensity matching (HR .86; 95% CI 0.74-1.01). Similarly, there was no demonstrated advantage of statins in reducing the risk of ICU admission (HR 0.92; 95% CI 0.74-1.31) or hypoxic respiratory failure requiring mechanical ventilation (HR 1.02; 95% CI 0.81-1.29). Antecedent statin exposure in patients with COVID-19 was not associated with a decreased risk of 30-day all-cause mortality or need for mechanical ventilation.

Comparison of in-hospital mortality risk prediction models from COVID-19.

OBJECTIVE: Our objective is to compare the predictive accuracy of four recently established outcome models of patients hospitalized with coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) published between January 1st and May 1st 2020. METHODS: We used data obtained from the Veterans Affairs Corporate Data Warehouse (CDW) between January 1st, 2020, and May 1st 2020 as an external validation cohort. The outcome measure was hospital mortality. Areas under the ROC (AUC) curves were used to evaluate discrimination of the four predictive models. The Hosmer-Lemeshow (HL) goodness-of-fit test and calibration curves assessed applicability of the models to individual cases. RESULTS: During the study period, 1634 unique patients were identified. The mean age of the study cohort was 68.8±13.4 years. Hypertension, hyperlipidemia, and heart disease were the most common comorbidities. The crude hospital mortality was 29% (95% confidence interval [CI] 0.27-0.31). Evaluation of the predictive models showed an AUC range from 0.63 (95% CI 0.60-0.66) to 0.72 (95% CI 0.69-0.74) indicating fair to poor discrimination across all models. There were no significant differences among the AUC values of the four prognostic systems. All models calibrated poorly by either overestimated or underestimated hospital mortality. CONCLUSIONS: All the four prognostic models examined in this study portend high-risk bias. The performance of these scores needs to be interpreted with caution in hospitalized patients with COVID-19.