Abstract: HHS Public Access Author manuscript Author Manuscript Int J Funct Nutr. Author manuscript; available in PMC 2021 July 30. Published in final edited form as: Int J Funct Nutr. 2021 ; 2(1): . doi:10.3892/ijfn.2021.14. Common drugs, vitamins, nutritional supplements and COVID-19 mortality STEVEN LEHRER1, PETER H. RHEINSTEIN2 1Department of Radiation Oncology, Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai, New York, NY 10029; Author Manuscript 2Severn Health Solutions, Severna Park, MD 21146, USA Abstract Author Manuscript 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 Author Manuscript This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0) License. Correspondence to: Dr Steven Lehrer, Department of Radiation Oncology, Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai, 1 Gustave L. Levy Place, New York, NY 10029, USA, steven.lehrer@mssm.edu. Authors’ contributions SL and PHR contributed equally to the conception, writing and data analysis of the present study. Availability of data and materials All data generated or analyzed during this study are included in this published article or are held by UK Biobank. 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. LEHRER and RHEINSTEIN Page 2 Author Manuscript COVID-19 are not novel, the utility of a new source, UKB, may prove to be useful in further examining these associations. Keywords drugs; COVID-19; mortality