The goal of the study was to determine whether taking nirmatrelvir during the acute coronavirus disease of 2019 (COVID-19) decreased the likelihood of developing post-COVID-19 condition (PCC), also known as long COVID.
Millions of people worldwide have been impacted by long COVID, which includes the post-acute sequelae of severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) infection (PASC). Although PCC prevention is a top public health priority, no medication has been approved to treat or prevent PCC.
In the present study, researchers first identified patients with acute SARS-CoV-2 infection with at least one preexisting risk factor for developing severe COVID-19. The study screened 281,793 individuals who met the following prespecified criteria, as follows:
i) received a confirmed COVID-19-positive diagnosis between January 3 2022, and December 31 2022;
ii) were not hospitalized from the day of testing COVID-19-positive;
iii) had a minimum of one risk factor to develop severe COVID-19; and
iv) survived the initial 30 days post-COVID-19 diagnosis.
The team divided the study participants into two cohorts. The first cohort comprising 35,717 patients, received oral nirmatrelvir therapy within five days of testing COVID-19-positive. The second cohort comprising 246,076 patients, received no antiviral treatment during the acute phase of the illness.
The primary study outcome was an estimate of nirmatrelvir therapy-related hospitalization, death, or PCC after the acute phase of illness. The team used an inverse probability-weighted survival model to fetch these estimates.
They recorded whether participants had any of the 13 prespecified PCC components (or post–acute sequelae) on a relative scale, recorded as risk (RR) or hazard ratio (HR), and their risk reduction in percentage at 180 days (ARR) as an absolute measure.
