#2649 Blood pressure tend to decrease following COVID-19 infection in patients with chronic kidney disease—lessons learned from a community based cohort
Authors: Angel-Korman Avital , Brosh-Nissimov Tal , Mayer Ori , Leiba Adi 
Published: May 2024

Background and Aims

Pre-existing hypertension (HTN) has been implicated as one of the most common co-morbidities in COVID-19 patients, likely contributing to disease severity. Additionally, the port of viral entry to the host cell—ACE2 receptor, which is a part of the renin-angiotensin-aldosterone system, was initially thought to cause blood pressure (BP) dysregulation. Recently, several large cohorts have been published, connecting COVID-19 infection to new-onset HTN. Nevertheless, the association of HTN with COVID-19 in patients with chronic kidney disease (CKD) in a community setting has not been fully elucidated.

We aimed to study the effect of COVID-19 infection on BP in patients with CKD.

Method

In this cohort study we utilized the Maccabi Healthcare Services (MHS) database during the COVID-19 pandemic. MHS is a nationwide health care payer-provider, providing health services to approximately 2.6 million Israelis. Data is automatically collected and includes comprehensive laboratory results from a single central lab, full pharmacy prescription and purchase data, physician visits, vital signs documentation, imaging and extensive demographic information on each patient. The database includes several automatically formulated registries including a well validated CKD registry.

On July 31st 2023 we looked at point prevalence of patients registered as having CKD stages I-V, defined as eGFR &lt;60 ml/min and/or albuminuria over 30 mg on 24 hour urine collection or 30 mg/g creatinine on urine albumin to creatinine ratio, or proteinuria above 150 mg either at spot urine protein to creatinine ratio or over 24 hour collection.

We included CKD patients over the age of 18 years, who had mostly mild COVID-19 disease, detected by SARS-CoV-2 PCR or antigen test between January 1st 2020 and December 31st 2022. Examinees were included only if they had at least one blood pressure measurement documented, in their primary care clinic, in the year prior to infection, and at least one measurement during the 12 months period following COVID-19. Only the 1st documented COVID-19 infection of each patient was included. We compared the differences in BP values between pre and post COVID-19.

Results

Out of 1,821,685 adults at Maccabi HMS in 2023, 193,566 patients were registered as having CKD. Of those, 86,618 had a documented first COVID-19 infection between the years 2020-2022, and 44,410 of them had documented BP measurements both prior and after COVID-19 were analyzed.

Mean age for all CKD patients who had COVID-19 was 69.2 (SD-12.9) years and 22,151 (49.9%) were males. Most patients had CKD stage III—26,939 (60%), and 535 (1.2%) were on dialysis. Not surprisingly, 76% of CKD patients had a preexisting diagnosis of HTN and 44% had diabetes mellitus.

Average BP values during the year prior to COVID-19 were 133/76.5 mmHg (SD 14.8 and 8.55, respectively). Mean BP values post COVID-19 were 132/75/9 mmHg (SD 15.5 and 8.9, respectively).

This translates into a reduction of 1 mmHg in systolic BP and 0.6 mmHg in diastolic BP in the year prior to COVID-19 infection as compared with pre-covid-19 infection (P-value 0.03 and 0.004, respectively).

Conclusion

Contrary to previous studies, that linked COVID-19 infection to a higher set-point of BP, our data demonstrates in a large community-based cohort of CKD patients, that BP does not increase and even trends down following COVID-19. As patients were one year older during their post-covid year, and some had withdrew ACE inhibitors or ARB, due to erroneous fear of adverse effect on Covid-19 infectivity, we believe that our results may even underestimate the extent of decrease in BP. Further investigation might reveal the possible mechanisms related to this favorable BP decrease after COVID-19 infection, in CKD patients.