Adverse drug events, comorbidities, and older age are statistically more prevalent in COVID-19 hospitalized patients treated with remdesivir than tocilizumab in a private hospital from southern Brazil
Abstract
Introduction: COVID-19 pandemic spread rapidly with more than 560 million cases and 6.3 million deaths. Since the emergence of the COVID-19 pandemic, the purpose of treating the disease has become a priority. To date, there is no consensus on the best pharmacological therapy. The objective of the present study was to compare two pharmacological therapies, evaluating the adverse drug events, one on the label (remdesivir) and another off-label (tocilizumab) used to treat patients hospitalized for COVID-19 in a private hospital in southern Brazil.
Methods: The study analyzed data from hospital records of 124 patients hospitalized with COVID-19 (n=80 treated with tocilizumab and n=34 with remdesivir), confirmed by RT-PCR, between 2020 and 2021. Poisson regression models with prevalence ratio (PR) with 95% confidence intervals (95%CI) were applied to confirm the association between dependent variables and with treatment used.
Results: Patients treated with remdesivir were older than those treated with tocilizumab (median 70.0 vs 61.0; p=0.02). Adverse drug effects were more frequent in patients treated with remdesivir (35.3%) than tocilizumab (3.8%) (p <0.01). Comorbidities ≥3 were 58.8% in the remdesivir group and 25.0% in the tocilizumab (p=0.01). In the multivariate analysis, patients treated with remdesivir had a higher prevalence of advanced age (PR:1.58; 95%CI:1.11–3.05), adverse reaction (PR:13.21; 95%CI:3.74–54.96), mechanical ventilation (PR: 5.60; 95%CI: 1.51-11.20), comorbidities ≥3 (PR:4.11; 95%CI:1.76–10.56), hypertension (PR:2.47; 95%CI:1.08–5.98), cardiac disease (PR:3.15; 95%CI:1.35–7.75), dyslipidemia (PR:3.83; 95%CI:1.15-13.55), cancer (PR:3.81; 95%CI:1.33-13.21) and kidney disease (PR:4.21; 95%CI:1.02–19.66).
Conclusion: Rendesivir-treated patients had more adverse events, were older, and had more comorbidities than tocilizumab-treated patients.
Downloads
Downloads
Published
How to Cite
Issue
Section
Categories
License
Copyright (c) 2023 Jonas Michel Wolf, Bianca Borges, Pamela Fagundes, Vinicius de Souza, Aline Brenner, Helena Petek, William dos Santos, Juçara Maccari, Vania Rohsig, Luiz Nasi
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.
Authors who publish with this journal agree to the following terms:
Authors retain copyright and grant the journal right of first publication with the work simultaneously licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution License that allows others to share the work with an acknowledgement of the work's authorship and initial publication in this journal.
Authors are able to enter into separate, additional contractual arrangements for the non-exclusive distribution of the journal's published version of the work (e.g., post it to an institutional repository or publish it in a book), with an acknowledgement of its initial publication in this journal.
Authors are permitted and encouraged to post their work online (e.g., in institutional repositories or on their website) prior to and during the submission process, as it can lead to productive exchanges, as well as earlier and greater citation of published work (See The Effect of Open Access).
