Clinical characteristics of COVID-19 patients admitted to Intensive Care Unit in Panama during the first pandemic wave admissions in 2020

  1. Silvio Vega
  2. Artur Gomez Blizniak
  3. Simón Theoktisto Ballanis
  4. Gabriel Cisneros
  5. David Villalobos
  6. Ana Kathleen Armuelles
  7. Luis Moreno
  8. Francis Fusumada
  9. Johanna Gonzalez
  10. Emilio Romero
  11. Ivonne Torres-Atencio
  12. Idalina Cubilla-Batista
  13. Amador Goodridge

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Abstract

The severe acute respiratory syndrome Coronavirus 2 (SARS COV-2) caused a global pandemic of COVID-19. Most of people affected are admitted to hospital with various grades of ADRS. A small proportion of these patients requires intensive care unit management and treatment. However not all of them survive. This study aims to describe the epidemiological and clinical characteristics of patients admitted to the intensive care units in Panama main hospital in the first six months of pandemic with available information. Special focus has been oriented to blood and respiratory biomarkers to correlate with survivors and non-survivors. Our results show that patients between 56-75 years old, with hypertension, obesity, and diabetes comorbid conditions are more likely to die in intensive care units. Regarding the PaFi ratio, we observed a greater proportion of non-survivor with values less than 200. The triglycerides, urea nitrogen, creatinine and procalcitonin levels resulted significantly higher in those non survivors. During clinical management, half of patient that were administered Tocilizumab did not survived. These results support the notion that age, comorbidities as well as therapeutic management of patient in intensive care units contribute to the final outcome. We recommend reinforcing patient care strategy, especially in those patients with clinical conditions that favor fatal outcomes.

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    SciScore for 10.1101/2022.05.08.22274803: (What is this?)

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

    Table 1: Rigor

    EthicsIRB: This study was approved by the National Bioethics Committee Board EC-CNBI-2020-10-103.
    Sex as a biological variablenot detected.
    Randomizationnot detected.
    Blindingnot detected.
    Power Analysisnot detected.

    Table 2: Resources

    Software and Algorithms
    SentencesResources
    All statistical testing will be carried out in SPSS v27 for Windows.
    SPSS
    suggested: (SPSS, RRID:SCR_002865)

    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: We detected the following sentences addressing limitations in the study:
    This study has several limitations. First, among the limitations we highlight those inherent to the type of study carried out (cross section descriptive observational study). We did not study causality, we only limited ourselves to describing our population. Second, the nature of the database did not allow more detailed information to be obtained, such as ventilatory monitoring of days after baseline or more specific laboratory data taken on days other than those officially designated for the study (for example, on weekends, no data was recorded in this regard). The number of cases is small, so there may be independent determinants of mortality that could not be identified. The sustained work burden on health personnel by COVID-19 could also have contributed to lack of some important information on medical records on the specific days designated for obtain it. Thus, further studies should allocate dedicated resource to tackle these limitations and assure a complete data set.

    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.

    Results from scite Reference Check: We found no unreliable references.

    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 10.1101/2022.05.08.22274803v1 on medRxiv