Covid patients on antidepressants less likely to die: study | Health

A new study of health records from 87 health centers across the United States found that people taking a class of antidepressants called selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors (SSRIs) were less likely to die from COVID-19 .

The results of the study were published in the journal ‘JAMA Network Open’.

The findings add to a body of evidence indicating that SSRIs may have beneficial effects against the worst symptoms of COVID-19, although large randomized clinical trials are needed to prove this.

“We can’t say if the drugs cause these effects, but statistical analysis shows a significant association. The numbers have power,” said Marina Sirota, PhD, associate professor of pediatrics and member of the Bakar Computational Health Sciences Institute. (BCHSI) at UC San Francisco.

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The UCSF-Stanford research team analyzed electronic health records from the anonymized Cerner Real World COVID-19 database, which contained information on nearly 500,000 patients across the United States. This included 83,584 adult patients diagnosed with COVID-19 between January and September 2020. Of these, 3,401 patients were prescribed SSRIs.

The large dataset size allowed researchers to compare the results of COVID-19 patients on SSRIs to a matched set of COVID-19 patients who were not taking them, highlighting the effects. age, gender, race, ethnicity, and co-morbidities associated with severe COVID-19, such as diabetes and heart disease, as well as other medications the patients were taking.

The results showed that patients taking fluoxetine were 28% less likely to die; those who took fluoxetine or another SSRI called fluvoxamine were 26% less likely to die; the whole group of patients taking any type of SSRI was 8% less likely to die than matched control patients.

Although the effects are weaker than those found in recent clinical trials of new antivirals developed by Pfizer and Merck, researchers said more treatment options are still needed to help end the pandemic.

“The results are encouraging. It is important to find as many options as possible to treat any condition. A particular drug or treatment may not work or be well tolerated by everyone. Electronic medical record data allow us to quickly review existing drugs that could be reused to treat COVID-19 or other conditions, ”said Tomiko Oskotsky, MD, a researcher at the Sirota lab at BCHSI.

Other authors include David K. Stevenson, MD, Ivana Maric, PhD, Ronald J Wong, PhD, and Nima Aghaeepour, PhD, of Stanford University; and Alice Tang and Boris Oskotsky, PhD, from UCSF.

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