Acta Pharmaceutica Sinica B (Nov 2023)

Azvudine reduces the in-hospital mortality of COVID-19 patients: A retrospective cohort study

  • Kaican Zong,
  • Hui Zhou,
  • Wen Li,
  • E Jiang,
  • Yi Liu,
  • Shiying Li

DOI
https://doi.org/10.1016/j.apsb.2023.07.007
Journal volume & issue
Vol. 13, no. 11
pp. 4655 – 4660

Abstract

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In our retrospective cohort study, we aim to explore whether Azvudine modifies the risk of death in COVID-19 patients. It was conducted on the medical records of patients, consecutively admitted for COVID-19 pneumonia to two hospitals in Chongqing, China. Based on Azvudine treatment exposure, the patients were divided into Azvudine group and non-Azvudine group. We used 1:2 ratio propensity score matching (PSM) in our study to adjust for confounding factors and differences between Azvudine and non-Azvudine groups. There were 1072 patients included in our original cohort. With 1:2 ratio PSM, the Azvudine group included 195 patients and non-Azvudine group included 390 patients. The results showed that Azvudine treatment was associated with improved in-hospital mortality in overall population (OR 0.375, 95% CI 0.225–0.623, P < 0.001), severe subgroup (OR 0.239, 95% CI 0.107–0.535, P = 0.001), critical subgroup (OR 0.091, 95% CI 0.011–0.769, P = 0.028) in matched cohort with univariate analysis. And there was a significantly lower in-hospital mortality in overall population (11% vs. 24%, P<0.001), severe sub-group (10% vs. 32%, P < 0.001) and critical sub-group (5% vs. 34%, P = 0.017) in matched cohort. These results suggest Azvudine can reduce in-hospital mortality in overall COVID-19 patients, severe, and critical subgroup population.

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