Association Between the Use of Statins and Risk of Tuberculosis: A Real-World Analysis

To the Editor—We read with great interest the recent study by Dutta et al [1], which demonstrated that pravastatin could exhibit potent anti-tuberculosis (TB) activity in 2 mouse models of TB chemotherapy and human-like necrotic TB lung granulomas. These findings suggest a potential role for pravastatin as an adjunctive host-directed therapy in the management of TB and support the need for further randomized clinical trials. In addition, we previously showed that statin therapy could be associated with a decreased risk of TB and suggested a role for the use of statins in preventing TB [2]. However, we did not assess the protective effect of individual statins, such as pravastatin. Thus, we conducted a real-world study using a national health insurance claims database to examine whether pravastatin and other statins exhibit protective effects against active TB. We conducted a secondary analysis on a previously published population-based...