Researchers have 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.
For the study, published in the Journal of the American Heart Association, the research team compared mortality rates among 5,00,000 Danish patients who were admitted to hospitals in Denmark with influenza and pneumonia during the period 2005 to 2018.
“A little over 1,00,000 of the admitted patients took ACE inhibitors or angiotensin II receptor blockers, and the study shows that fewer of them were put on a ventilator and that they had lower mortality rates,” said study author Christian Fynbo Christiansen from the Aarhus University Hospital in Denmark.