Common drugs, vitamins, nutritional supplements and COVID-19 mortality
Dr Steven Lehrer, Peter H Rheinstein
doi:10.3892/ijfn.2021.14
The FDA has approved only one drug, remdesivir, for the treatment of COVID-19. The FDA has granted an emergency use authorization for the rheumatoid arthritis treatment drug, baricitinib (Olumiant), for the treatment of COVID-19 in some cases. For this reason, investigators have paid considerable attention to the association between commonly used drugs and the outcome of patients with COVID-19. Aspirin and ibuprofen have been reported to reduce the mortality rate. Omeprazole can increase mortality. In addition, some studies have demonstrated that famotidine diminishes mortality, while others have indicated that famotidine leads to a poorer prognosis. The present study used UK Biobank (UKB) data to assess the association of commonly used drugs with COVID-19 mortality. Data processing was performed on Minerva, a Linux mainframe with Centos 7.6. The UK Biobank Data Parser (ukbb_parser) was used, a python-based package that allows easy interfacing with the large UK Biobank dataset. The results revealed that aspirin and omeprazole were associated with an elevated mortality rate. Ibuprofen-related mortality was lower than laxative-related mortality. Aspirin users were also significantly older than other subjects. The association with mortality of cholesterol-lowering medications, blood pressure-lowering medications, hormone replacement and oral contraceptives in 134 female subjects revealed insignificant variability. The association of nutritional supplements in 238 subjects with mortality indicated that variability was insignificant. The lower mortality linked to the supplementation of vitamin D and vitamin B, presumably B complex, has been previously observed. On the whole, the present study demonstrates that although some of the associations described among drugs and This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0) License.
Ethics approval and consent to participate All patient data were from the UK Biobank. The UK Biobank application for the present study was approved as UKB project 57245, SL and PHR. Patient consent for publication Not applicable.
Competing interests The authors declare that they have no competing interests.
Author Manuscript The research reported in the present study was supported by the Office of Research Infrastructure of the National Institutes of Health under award nos. S10OD018522 and S10OD026880. The content is solely the responsibility of the authors and does not necessarily represent the official views of the National Institutes of Health.
Author Manuscript
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