Influenza Morbidity and Mortality in Elderly Patients Receiving Statins: A Cohort Study
Bibliographic record
Abstract
BACKGROUND: Statins possess immunomodulatory properties and have been proposed for reducing morbidity during an influenza pandemic. We sought to evaluate the effect of statins on hospitalizations and deaths related to seasonal influenza outbreaks. METHODOLOGY/PRINCIPAL FINDINGS: We conducted a population-based cohort study over 10 influenza seasons (1996 to 2006) using linked administrative databases in Ontario, Canada. We identified all adults older than 65 years who had received an influenza vaccination prior to the start of influenza season and distinguished those also prescribed statins (23%) from those not also prescribed statins (77%). Propensity-based matching, which accounted for each individual's likelihood of receiving a statin, yielded a final cohort of 2,240,638 patients, exactly half of whom received statins. Statins were associated with small protective effects against pneumonia hospitalization (odds ratio [OR] 0.92; 95% CI 0.89-0.95), 30-day pneumonia mortality (0.84; 95% CI 0.77-0.91), and all-cause mortality (0.87; 95% CI 0.84-0.89). These protective effects attenuated substantially after multivariate adjustment and when we excluded multiple observations for each individual, declined over time, differed across propensity score quintiles and risk groups, and were unchanged during post-influenza season periods. The main limitations of this study were the observational study design, the non-specific outcomes, and the lack of information on medications while hospitalized. CONCLUSIONS/SIGNIFICANCE: Statin use is associated with a statistically significant but minimal protective effect against influenza morbidity that can easily be attributed to residual confounding. Public health officials and clinicians should focus on other measures to reduce morbidity and mortality from the next influenza pandemic.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".