Risk assessment for cardiovascular adverse drug events in the ICU: Case study on COVID-19 patients
Natalia L. Freitas, Raiane Diniz Oliveira, Ana Katarina da Silva Santos, Marcilio Cunha-Filho, Patricia Medeiros-Souza
Abstract
The COVID-19 outbreak quickly became a pandemic. In Brazil, more than seven million cases were recorded in 2020. Most patients affected by the disease were admitted to intensive care units (ICU), requiring qualitative polypharmacy, increasing the risk of serious adverse drug reactions (ADE), especially cardiovascular.
Introduction
In 2020, Brazil had more than 7 million cases of COVID-19 and almost 200 thousand deaths, with incidence and mortality rates of 3,653/100 thousand inhabitants and 93/100 thousand inhabitants, respectively. During this period, the Federal District accounted for 251,701 cases, and 4,259 deaths had already been recorded, with an incidence rate of 8,348/100 thousand inhabitants and a mortality rate of 141/100 thousand inhabitants [1].
Materials and method
2.1 Delimitation of the population
The medical records of adults with COVID-19 hospitalized in the ICU of the reference hospital for COVID-19 in Brasília/Brazil, from March to December 2020, were compiled. The selected patients were over 18 years old, of both sexes, and diagnosed with COVID-19 by RT-PCR laboratory test, rapid test, or symptomatological diagnosis.
Results
After the exclusion criteria, 106 medical records were considered for the present study. The qualitative variables are presented by frequency (n) and percentage (%) in Table 1, including the sociodemographic and clinical data.
Discussion
The assessment of demographic data is relevant to this study, especially given the pandemic context in which it was conducted. The average ICU stay was 21 days. This result is similar to other published studies regarding the same period of COVID-19 pre-vaccination. In fact, a systematic review and meta-analysis conducted by Alimohamadi et al.
Acknowledgments
The authors would like to thank hospital director, Dr. Paulo Roberto da Silva Júnior, for facilitating access to data collection and to students João Vitor Tomé Alcântara and Jennifer Martins do Nascimento for helping to organize data collection.
Citation: Freitas NL, Oliveira RD, Santos AKdS, Cunha-Filho M, Medeiros-Souza P (2026) Risk assessment for cardiovascular adverse drug events in the ICU: Case study on COVID-19 patients. PLoS One 21(3): e0345280. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0345280
Editor: Mohammed Misbah Ul Haq, Deccan School of Pharmacy, INDIA
Received: March 4, 2025; Accepted: March 4, 2026; Published: March 24, 2026
Copyright: © 2026 Freitas et al. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.
Data Availability: All relevant data are within the article and its supporting information files. Dataset is available at https://doi.org/10.34740/kaggle/dsv/11795374.
Funding: This work was supported by the Brazilian agencies CAPES (fellowship to N.L.F.), Fundação de Apoio à Pesquisa do Distrito Federal – FAPDF (Grant No. 00193-00000817/2021-64 to M.C.F. and Grant No. 00193-00001913/2024-72 to P.M.S.), and the University of Brasília (Edital nº 001/2026 DPI/BCE/UnB, awarded to P.M.S.). The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or manuscript preparation.
Competing interests: The authors have declared that no competing interests exist.
