US study
dementia, hypertension, chronic lung disease
DISEASE, DIABETES MELLITUS, ATHEROSCLEROTIC CARDIOVASCULAR DISEASE, HEART FAILURE, HYPERTENSION, CHRONIC LUNG DISEASE, CHRONIC LIVER DISEASE
A validation study was conducted using an existing observational cohort of 920,922 veterans with hypertension (defined by diagnostic codes for hypertension and at least two fills for antihypertensive medications from January 1, 2020, to October 25, 2020, and restricted to those veterans with evidence of using the Veterans Health Administration for their primary care). There were 5144 (0.6%) veterans in the cohort who tested positive for SARS-CoV-2 between March 14, 2020, and October 25, 2020. Medication use was determined by confirmed pharmacy fills. The cohort contained a diverse, non-homogenous patient population with different disease severity. To minimize baseline differences between fenofibrate users and the three comparison groups (non-users, statin users, and TZD users), 1:5 propensity score matching was performed using Stata version 15.0. Baseline matching variables included age, sex, body mass index, race/ethnicity, and history of atherosclerotic cardiovascular disease, heart failure, diabetes mellitus, chronic lung disease, chronic liver disease, dementia, and current or former smoker. We performed nearest neighbor matching with a caliper of 0.1. We required a<10% standardized difference in each of the matched covariates between matched groups, as well as Rubin’s B of ≤25% and Rubin’s R between 0.5–2 to verify sufficient matching.