In a new study, researchers found that drugs to lower the blood pressure of the type ACE inhibitors or angiotensin II receptor blockers reduce the mortality rate of influenza and pneumonia
The research was conducted by a team at Aarhus University and Aarhus University Hospital in Denmark.
In the study, the researchers compared mortality rates among 500,000 Danish patients who were admitted to hospitals in Denmark with influenza and pneumonia during the period 2005 to 2018.
They found a little over 100,000 of the admitted patients took ACE inhibitors or angiotensin II receptor blockers.
Fewer of the patients were put on a ventilator and that they had lower mortality rates than the hospitalized patients who took another type of drug against elevated blood pressure, calcium blockers.
The study arrives mid in a discussion of treatment which peaked while the corona pandemic was at its height.
Some medical doctors and researchers pointed out that ACE inhibitors may actually have the completely opposite effect – that is increasing the risk of dying from COVID-19 as the virus SARS-CoV-2 which causes COVID-19 enters the lungs through the same ACE receptors as the ACE inhibitors.
The hypothesis was that when the ACE inhibitor reduces the level of ACE, the body compensates for this by activating a much greater number of ACE receptors on the surface of the cells, which the SARS-CoV-2 virus then utilizes as some kind of access key.
The greater the number of access keys available on the surface of the cells, the more easily the virus gains access to the cells.
The theory about increased mortality has been nurtured by the fact that a strikingly large proportion of the patients who were seriously ill due to COVID-19 had elevated blood pressure, which is extensively treated with ACE inhibitors.
One author of the study is Christian Fynbo Christiansen.
The study is published in the Journal of the American Heart Association.
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