Results:
We identified 5490 patients with COVID-19 who were admitted to the hospital. After excluding subjects with no hypertension and those with missing data, we included 2129 COVID-19 patients who had hypertension. Table 1 reveals the baseline subject characteristics of the two groups (a group that has a history of ACEI/ARB use and a group with no history of ACEI/ARBs use. Both groups are similar in terms of sex, BMI, and use of steroid during hospitalization. There were more patients with DM, heart failure, ESRD, asthma, and COPD in the ACEI/ARB group than in the non-ACE/ARB group. A total of 532 (25%) patients were admitted to ICU or PCU (319 subjects (25%) from ACEI/ARB group and 213 (25%) subjects from non-ACEI/ARB group). There was no statistically significant difference in ICU admission rates between the ACEI/ARB and no ACEI/ARB groups in both adjusted (odds ratio= 1.02, 95% CI [0.04, 0.22], p-value= 0.7) and unadjusted models (odds ratio= 0.95, 95% CI [0.76,1.19], p-value= 0.6) ( Table 2).
Table 1: Baseline patients characteristics.