Patients hospitalized with COVID-19 are younger and healthier than influenza patients.Health news

Washington: Recent studies show that patients hospitalized for COVID-19 are more likely to be male and younger and have fewer comorbidities (multiple diseases at the same time) than hospitalized influenza patients in both the United States and Spain. ), Drug use was low.

This study was published by the Observational Health Data Sciences and Informatics (OHDSI) community. OHDSI, along with the Central Coordinating Center at Columbia University’s Faculty of Biomedical Informatics, has established an international network of researchers and observational health databases.

This global network study of more than 34,000 COVID-19 patients across three continents provides a more detailed description of the characteristics of patients suffering from the disease and informs inpatient care decisions. I am aiming.

Live broadcast

Nature Communications has published a study entitled “The Deep Phenotype of 34,128 Adult Patients Admitted to COVID-19 in an International Network Study.” Patients hospitalized for COVID-19 were more commonly male in the United States and Spain, but more often female in South Korea.

Patients varied in age, but in Spain and the United States, the most common age group was 60-75 years. Patients hospitalized for influenza were usually older and more likely to be female than those hospitalized for COVID-19.

Many patients admitted with COVID-19 were found to be in other health conditions. For example, across data sources, the prevalence of hypertensive disorders ranged from 24% to 70%, diabetes from 13% to 43%, and asthma from 4% to 15%.

However, nevertheless, patients with COVID-19 were generally seen as healthy when compared to those who were recently hospitalized for influenza. Chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD), cardiovascular disease, and dementia were all more common among people hospitalized with influenza compared to those hospitalized with COVID-19.

“This study provided a better understanding of the profile of patients admitted with COVID-19,” said co-author Edward Burn.

“Despite recent debates about poor health and life expectancy limits in COVID-19 patients, COVID-19 patients are not in poorer health than those who are usually hospitalized for influenza. This is COVID. -19 Further emphasizes the high mortality rate of patients. “

The study was initiated during the 88-hour global interdisciplinary collaboration OHD SICOVID-19 Stadiatone. Early COVID-19 data, provided by the Korean Health Insurance Review and Assessment Service (HIRA), empowered the community to generate some of the early multinational studies during the pandemic.

All analysis is performed on individual sites, eliminating the need to share patient-level data and maintaining patient privacy. The most interesting part of this study was the failure to provide details of patient characteristics throughout the facility. It violates privacy, “said Seng Chan You, co-author who led the effort to map HIRA data to the OHDSI common data model.

“It’s important to know that this is possible because we don’t know what will happen next. When is the next pandemic? Whatever happens, it provides important patient characteristics that enable collaborative global research. We know what we can do. “

This study was developed and carried out by the OHDSI community, an interdisciplinary collaboration of multiple stakeholders that serves to unlock the value of health data through extensive analysis. All solutions are open source and have links to research protocols, code, and results in the paper.

“Open science and collaboration are the beliefs of the OHDSI community and have never been more important than in the early days of this pandemic,” said Patrick Ryan, co-author of the study.

“Our community has worked together over the years to develop high-level analyses that set the course for these studies. Due to our belief in sharing patient data openly, this reliability Was able to generate highly reproducible COVID patient data. We will fight this disease. “

“This study is the foundational work for future joint evidence generation by both OHDSI and the EHDEN Consortium mapping additional COVID data across Europe,” said co-lead author Daniel Priet Alhambra. I am.

“Overalling the baseline demographics, clinical features, treatments and outcomes of COVID-19 patients and stratifying by gender, age, and specific comorbidities is a major factor in decision making in this pandemic. It will help. We are collaborating globally on these studies, “added Daniel Priet. -Alhambra.