Clinical characteristics of critically ill patients with COVID-19

  1. Indalecio Carboni Bisso
  2. Iván Huespe
  3. Carolina Lockhart
  4. Agustín Massó
  5. Julieta González Anaya
  6. Micaela Hornos
  7. Romina Famiglietti
  8. Marcelo Di Grazia
  9. Pablo Coria
  10. Eduardo San Román
  11. Marcos Las Heras

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Abstract

Objective

Describe the clinical and respiratory characteristics of critical patients with coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19).

Design

Observational and retrospective study over 6 months.

Setting

Intensive care unit (ICU) of a high complexity hospital in Buenos Aires, Argentina.

Patients

Patients older than 18 years with laboratory-confirmed COVID-19 by reverse transcriptase-polymerase chain reaction (RT-PCR) for SARS-CoV-2 were included in the study.

Variables of interest

Demographic characteristics such as sex and age, comorbidities, laboratory results, imaging results, ventilatory mechanics data, complications, and mortality were recorded.

Results

A total of 168 critically ill patients with COVID-19 were included. 66% were men with a median age of 65 years (58-75. 79.7% had at least one comorbidity. The most frequent comorbidity was arterial hypertension, affecting 52.4% of the patients. 67.9 % required invasive mechanical ventilation (MV), and no patient was treated with non-invasive ventilation. Most of the patients in MV (73.7%) required neuromuscular blockade due to severe hypoxemia. 36% of patients were ventilated in the prone position. The length of stay in the ICU was 13 days (6-24) and the mortality in the ICU was 25%.

Conclusions

In this study of critical patients infected by SARS-CoV-2 in a high-complexity hospital, the majority were comorbid elderly men, a large percentage required invasive mechanical ventilation, and ICU mortality was 25%.

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  1. ScreenIT

    SciScore for 10.1101/2020.12.09.20246413: (What is this?)

    Please note, not all rigor criteria are appropriate for all manuscripts.

    Table 1: Rigor

    Institutional Review Board StatementIRB: Only laboratory-confirmed cases were included in the analysis and the study was approved by the Hospital Ethics Committee in March 2019.
    Randomizationnot detected.
    Blindingnot detected.
    Power Analysisnot detected.
    Sex as a biological variablenot detected.

    Table 2: Resources

    No key resources detected.

    Results from OddPub: We did not detect open data. We also did not detect open code. Researchers are encouraged to share open data when possible (see Nature blog).

    Results from LimitationRecognizer: An explicit section about the limitations of the techniques employed in this study was not found. We encourage authors to address study limitations.

    Results from TrialIdentifier: No clinical trial numbers were referenced.

    Results from Barzooka: We did not find any issues relating to the usage of bar graphs.

    Results from JetFighter: We did not find any issues relating to colormaps.

    Results from rtransparent:
    • Thank you for including a conflict of interest statement. Authors are encouraged to include this statement when submitting to a journal.
    • Thank you for including a funding statement. Authors are encouraged to include this statement when submitting to a journal.
    • No protocol registration statement was detected.

    About SciScore

    SciScore is an automated tool that is designed to assist expert reviewers by finding and presenting formulaic information scattered throughout a paper in a standard, easy to digest format. SciScore checks for the presence and correctness of RRIDs (research resource identifiers), and for rigor criteria such as sex and investigator blinding. For details on the theoretical underpinning of rigor criteria and the tools shown here, including references cited, please follow this link.

  2. Version published to 10.1101/2020.12.09.20246413v1 on medRxiv