Assessment of the hematologic factors as a prognostic factor in COVID-19 patients

Introduction: Identifying laboratory predictors of disease progression should be a priority in current COVID-19 studies, which leads to an appropriate treatment for patients and reduce the risk of severe or critical illness. In this study we tend to analyze the hematologic and biochemical findings of COVID-19 patients as an easy-to-get diagnostic factor that can become the first choice for disease monitoring and the evaluation of general conditions. Methods: In this retrospective study, all patients with positive COVID-19 diagnosis that admitted to the emergency department, from 1st of April 2020, to 30th June, 2020 were included. For all patients, CBC, differential, urea, serum creatinine, and CRP were collected. Data analysis was performed using IBM® SPSS® Statistics 19.0 software. Pearson correlation and spearman correlation were used to analyze quantitative and qualitative data correlations respectively. Diagnostic ability of the variables was identified by their ROC curves. Results: A total number of 977 patients were included in this study. The median and mode of the age of the population are 50 and 29 respectively. ROC curves for diagnostic ability indicated that, Urea and creatinine have the highest diagnostic values with its optimum sensitivity and specificity for urea=62.5 mg/dL and creatinine=2.05 mg/dL, with sensitivities of 87.5% and 81.3%, and specificities of 80.6% and 82.1% respectively. Conclusion: The results from the current study show that no chemical or hematologic factor can properly detect COVID-19 in patients. Also, hematologic factors cannot determine patients’ prognosis; however creatinine and urea are able to estimate patients’ prognosis. Therefore, it is recommended to focus on the kidney injuries in COVID-10 patients for predicting their prognosis.