People who took statins —widely used cholesterol-lowering medications – may have reduced risk of developing severe Covid-19 disease, a team of researchers said adding that they were approximately 50 per cent less likely to die if hospitalised for the infection.

“Our study is one of the larger studies confirming this hypothesis and the data lay the groundwork for future randomized clinical trials that are needed to confirm the benefit of statins in Covid-19,” said Aakriti Gupta, cardiologist at NewYorkPresbyterian/ Columbia University Irving Medical Center and one of the co-lead authors of the study published in the Nature Communications.

“If their beneficial effect bears out in randomized clinical trials, statins could potentially prove to be a low-cost and effective therapeutic strategy for COVID-19,” adds co-lead author Mahesh V Madhavan,  cardiologist at NewYork-Presbyterian/Columbia University Irving Medical Center.

Gupta, Madhavan, and the study’s leadership group are cardiologists who cared for hospitalized Covid-19 patients in the spring and summer of 2020 when the first wave of the pandemic swept through New York City.

“We observed that patients who got very sick and required hospitalization had high rates of hyperinflammation and clotting,” says Elaine Wan, the Esther Aboodi Assistant Professor of Medicine in Cardiology and Cardiac Electrophysiology and a cardiac electrophysiologist at NewYork Presbyterian /Columbia University Irving Medical Center, one of the study’s senior authors.

“As cardiologists, statins naturally came to mind,” Gupta says. “In addition to their well-known cholesterol-lowering effect, statins are known for their anti-inflammatory, anticoagulant and immunomodulatory properties.”

Based on their observations, the authors looked at outcomes for 2,626 patients with Covid-19 who were admitted to a quaternary academic medical center in Manhattan during the first 18 weeks of the pandemic.