- New research offers reassuring evidence to hundreds of millions of people with high blood pressure that popular anti-hypertension drugs do not put them at greater risk from COVID-19 as some experts had feared.
Researchers at Oxford University had recommended some patients stop the drugs until the risks were better known, while others argued patients should stay on the medications. An expert at the Johns Hopkins Center for Drug Safety and Effectiveness in Baltimore described the debate as “one of the most important clinical questions.”
“Our findings are quite reassuring,” said Marc Suchard, a biostatistician at the University of California, Los Angeles, who co-led the study. “Taking an ACE or an ARB is just as safe as other first-list hypertension agents in terms of your risk of contracting COVID-19.” Harmony R. Reynolds, a cardiologist at New York University Grossman School of Medicine and the lead author of a study published last month in The New England Journal of Medicine, said she had been besieged by calls from worried patients.