Do heart medications affect COVID-19 outcomes?

Cardiovascular drugs do not affect COVID-19 outcomes—such as disease severity, hospitalizations, or deaths—according to an analysis of all relevant studies published as of November 2020. The findings are published in the British Journal of Clinical Pharmacology.

Investigators included 429 studies in a qualitative analysis and 390 in a quantitative analysis.

The results indicate that patients at risk of or with confirmed COVID-19 should continue taking cardiovascular drugs as prescribed.

"This is the most comprehensive analysis of the extensive amount of data published in this area," said senior author Munir Pirmohamed, MBChB, Ph.D., of the University of Liverpool, in the UK. "Given that we are still in the midst of a pandemic, the evidence base will continue to build, and we will therefore update our analysis."