Telemonitoring for Cystic fibrosis patients of Bambino Gesù Children's Hospital during COVID-19.

Background: Cystic fibrosis (CF) is the most common autosomal recessive genetic pathology of the Caucasian race and it affects nearly 100,000 people worldwide (many have not been diagnosed) and, in Italy, there are about 6000 patients. In the last few years, telemedicine has proved to be an effective home care tool for patients suffering from chronic pathologies. The advent of the COVID-19 pandemic has caused an increase of communications through mobile devices. Aim: To evaluate the role of telemonitoring during the pandemic phase of Covid-19. Materials and methods: 34 (M 15, F 19) (M 44%, F 56%) Cystic Fi-brosis patients were evaluated; Median age ± SD 30.97±10.59 Median FEV1 2020 74.76; number of trasmission and hospital admissions. Results: It was evident that the absolute number of telemedicine visits increased from 1456 to 1605 in the pandemic year (10% more). Conclusions: Telemedicine became an important tool for home management of patients, in particular about chronic diseases. Telemonitoring, an integral part of telemedicine, underlined its effectiveness in all health emergency phase.

Cardiac biomarkers and mortality in COVID-19 infection

Aims: The SARS-CoV-2 infection is mostly characterized by acute lung injury. Yet, some COVID-19 patients showed also neurological signs, acute myocardial injury, heart failure, myocarditis, and hypercoagulability, such as pulmonary embolism. Cardiac biomarkers can play an essential role in the diagnosis, management, and prognosis of COVID-19. In fact, during hospitalization, these patients develop biochemical abnormalities, with increasing of all Troponins (TnT), B-type natriuretic peptide (NT-pro-BNP) and creatine kinase-myocardial band (CK-MB) levels. This situation helps us to predict adverse outcomes, especially in patients with cardiovascular comorbidities or risk factors. Data emerged demonstrated a myocardial involvement which determines a high risk of adverse events and increasing of mortality. Methods and results: Lots of meta-analysis emphasize that a great number of hospitalized patients with moderate and severe forms of COVID-19 developed acute myocardial damage, defined as an increase of cardiac biomarkers, such NT-pro-BNP, CK-MB, and of all type of troponins. The highest mortality rate is related with progressively increasing biomarkers levels and with a history of cardiovascular disease. In fact, the biomarkers dosage should be considered as a prognostic marker in all patients with COVID-19 disease at admission, during hospitalization and in the case of clinical deterioration. Our purpose is to evaluate cardiovascular prognostic factors in COVID-19 disease throughout the analysis of cardiac biomarkers to early identify the most serious patients and to optimize their outcomes. Results of aforementioned studies underline how cardiac biomarkers are associated with severe form of COVID- 19 infection. Above all, higher levels of these biomarkers are significantly associated with an increased risk of the mortality in COVID-19 infected patients. Therefore, has been demonstrated COVID-19 infection is more severe in those patients with a previous history of arterial hypertension, cardiovascular diseases. In addition to classical laboratory parameters evaluated in COVID-19 infection, such as C Reactive Protein (CRP), D-dimer, and lactate dehydrogenase (LDH), which are currently used in clinical practice, others biomarkers could potentially be useful for screening, clinical management, and prevention of serious complications. Therefore, it is clinically significant that fluctuating levels of myocardial biomarkers are closely monitored and patients with high levels of myocardial biomarkers are treated promptly to improve prognosis. At the end, on basis of symptoms and cardiac biomarkers patients could be divided in mild, severe and critical. Conclusions: Biomarkers of acute myocardial injury play an important role in predicting worsening prognosis for COVID-19 patients with and without myocardial injury. They are not only predictive of disease severity, but are also helpful for therapeutic management, based on drugs preventing the activation of coagulation processes. It's important, above all, to identify a laboratory score, made by haematological, inflammatory, biochemical, and immunological parameters, may help to stratify COVID-19 positive patients into risk categories for deciding therapeutic management, thus avoiding cardiac compromise which, as we have previously analysed, is an indication of a poor prognosis.