Infection with COVID-19 does not increase blood pressure in patients with chronic kidney disease

The association between hypertension (HTN) and COVID-19 in patients with chronic kidney disease (CKD) has not been completely elucidated. We aimed to study the effect of COVID-19 on HTN severity in patients with CKD. Included in the analysis were all adults, insured by Maccabi Healthcare Services, a large-scale Health Maintenance Organization, who were registered as having CKD on 1.7.2023. Patients in the study group had a confirmed SARS-CoV-2 infection during the study period (2020-2022), whereas patients in the control group did not. The infection date was defined as T0 for the study group, whereas T0-f-COVID denotes a matched time point for controls. We compared the differences in blood pressure values between pre- and post- T0 in both groups. A group of 85,502 CKD patients with documented COVID-19, of which 43,875 patients had at least two blood pressure (BP) measurements documented, both prior to and after T0 (study group). The control group of 136,645 CKD patients had no documented COVID-19 cases, and 58,874 had similarly documented BP measurements. On average, there were six BP measurements during the study period in both groups. The average BP values in the study group decreased by 1 mmHg systolic and 0.6 mmHg diastolic following COVID-19 (P value 0.03 and 0.004, respectively). The difference in BP values in the control group was -0.8 mmHg and -0.6 mmHg for systolic and diastolic BP (p < 0.001 for both values). Contrary to previous studies, our data demonstrated that BP does not increase following COVID-19 in patients with CKD.