Secondary pneumonia has been found to be the leading cause of death in COVID-19 patients, scientists at Northwestern University say.
The results of their study are published in the Journal of Clinical Investigation, tells BB.LV. Scientists found that people who contracted the coronavirus did not die from a cytokine storm*, but from a secondary bacterial infection. The use of machine learning methods for the analysis of medical records helped to come to a similar conclusion. Details are set out in published in the JCI article.
For the analysis, medical records of 585 patients who were admitted to the intensive care unit with severe pneumonia and respiratory failure were used. COVID-19 was diagnosed in 190 of them. A machine learning method called CarpeDiem was used to group similar ICU patient days by clinical condition. This made it possible to find out how secondary bacterial infections affected the lives of patients.
The patients whose data were used for the analysis participated in the SCRIPT study to identify new biomarkers and treatments for patients with severe pneumonia. As part of SCRIPT, a team of physicians in the ICU used state-of-the-art analysis of specimens collected from clinical care to diagnose and study outcomes of secondary pneumonia.
Data analysis showed that the role of bacterial superinfection of the lungs as a cause of death in patients with COVID-19 was underestimated, as most centers did not look for it or considered results only in terms of the presence or absence of bacterial superinfection, and not whether its treatment is successful or not. In the future, scientists plan to find out what factors influenced the fact that some patients were cured of pneumonia, while others were not.
* Cytokine storm (hypercytokinemia) is an aggressive immune response of the body to a viral infection and drugs, during which peptide molecules – cytokines are actively produced, extensive systemic inflammation develops, and the proper functioning of the immune system is disrupted.
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