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Research Paper|Volume 12, Issue 23|pp 23436—23449

Clinical characteristics and fatal outcomes of hypertension in patients with severe COVID-19

Xiaocheng Cheng1, Guoqiang Cai2, Xuesong Wen1, Lei Gao1, Dan Jiang1, Min Sun1, Shu Qin1, Jianzhong Zhou1, Dongying Zhang1
  • 1Department of Cardiology, The First Affiliated Hospital of Chongqing Medical University, Chongqing 400016, China
  • 2Department of Emergency, Traditional Chinese Medicine Hospital Dianjiang Chongqing, Chongqing 408300, China
* Equal contribution
Received: May 19, 2020Accepted: August 19, 2020Published: November 16, 2020
https://doi.org/10.18632/aging.104019

Copyright: © 2020 Cheng et al. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY 3.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.

Abstract

The aim of this study is to investigate clinical characteristics and fatal outcomes of hypertension as well as the role of angiotensin-converting enzyme inhibitors/angiotensin receptor blockers (ACEI/ARB) use in patients with severe coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19). A total of 220 (female: 51.8%) patients with severe COVID-19 were included. The mean age of included patients was 59.5 years and 70 (31.8%) patients had a history of hypertension. There were 23 patients (32.9%) receiving ACEI/ARB therapy. Patients with hypertension were older and had more comorbidities, and were more likely to suffer from severe inflammatory response and acute cardiac injury. Moreover, patients with hypertension were associated with significantly higher risk of in-hospital mortality than patients without hypertension. After adjustment of potential confounders, the independent correlation was still observed. In addition, ACEI/ARB users were associated with lower level of high-sensitivity cardiac troponin I and creatinine kinase–myocardial band, and lower risk of acute cardiac injury than ACEI/ARB non-users. In conclusion, patients with hypertension were more likely to suffer from severe inflammatory response, acute cardiac injury and had high risk of in-hospital mortality in severe COVID-19. The use of ACEI/ARB may protect patients with COVID-19 from acute cardiac injury.