ABSTRACT
Objectives The aim of the present study was to develop and validate the CoronaVirus Disease 2019 (COVID19) Questionnaire (COVIDQ), a novel symptom questionnaire specific for COVID19 patients, to provide a comprehensive evaluation which may be helpful for physicians. A secondary goal of the present study was to evaluate the performance of the COVIDQ in identifying subjects at higher risk of being tested positive for COVID19. Material and methods Consecutive not hospitalized adults who underwent nasopharyngeal and throat swab for severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARSCoV2) detection at Treviso Hospital in March 2020, were enrolled. Subjects were divided into positive (cases) and negative (controls) in equal number. All of them gave consent and answered the COVIDQ. Patients not able to answer the COVIDQ due to clinical conditions were excluded. Parallel Analysis and Principal Component Analysis were used to identify clusters of items measuring the same dimension. The Item Response Theory (IRT) based analyses evaluated the functioning of item categories, the presence of clusters of local dependence among items, item fit within the model and model fit to the data. Results Answers obtained from 230 COVID19 cases (113 males, and 117 females; mean age 55 years, range 20 to 99 years) and 230 controls (61 males, and 169 females; mean age 46 years, range 21 to 89) were analyzed. Parallel analysis led to the extraction of six components, which corresponded to as many clinical presentation patterns: asthenia, influenza symptoms, ear and nose symptoms, breathing issues, throat symptoms, and anosmia/ageusia. The final IRT models retained 27 items as significant for symptom assessment. The total score on the questionnaire was significantly associated with positivity to the molecular SARSCoV2 test: subjects with multiple symptoms were significantly more likely to be affected by COVID19 (p < .001). Older age and male gender also represented risk factors. Presence of breathing issues and anosmia/ageusia were significantly related to positivity to SARSCoV2 (p < 0.001). None of the examined comorbidities had a significant association with COVID19 diagnosis. Conclusion According to the analyses, COVIDQ could be validated since the aspects it evaluated were overall significantly related to SARSCoV2 infection. The application of the novel COVIDQ to everyday clinical practice may help identifying subjects who are likely to be affected by COVID19 and address them to a nasopharyngeal swab in order to achieve an early diagnosis.
Subject(s)
COVID-19 , Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome , AgeusiaABSTRACT
Objectives: The aim of the present study is to develop and validate the COVID-Q, a novel symptom questionnaire specific for COVID-19 patients, to provide a comprehensive and standard clinical evaluation. A secondary goal of the present study was to evaluate the performance of the COVID-Q in identifying subjects at higher risk of being tested positive for COVID-19. Material and methods 460 subjects (230 COVID-19 cases and 230 healthy controls), answered the COVID-Q. Parallel Analysis and Principal Component Analysis were used to identify clusters of items measuring the same dimension. The IRT-based analyses evaluated the functioning of item categories, the presence of clusters of local dependence among items, item fit within the model and model fit to the data. Results Parallel analysis suggested the extraction of six components, which corresponded to as many clinical presentation patterns: asthenia, influenza-like symptoms, ear and nose symptoms, breathing issues, throat symptoms, and anosmia/ageusia. The final IRT models retained 27 items as significant for symptom assessment. The total score on the questionnaire was significantly associated with positivity to the molecular SARS-CoV-2 test. Subjects with multiple symptoms were significantly more likely to be affected by COVID-19 (p < .001). Older age and male gender also represented risk factors. None of the examined comorbidities had a significant association with COVID-19 diagnosis. Conclusion The application of the novel COVID-Q to everyday clinical practice may help identifying subjects who are likely to be affected by COVID-19 and address them to a nasopharyngeal swab in order to achieve an early diagnosis.
Subject(s)
COVID-19 , Olfaction DisordersABSTRACT
The novelty of new human coronavirus COVID-19/SARS-CoV-2 and the lack of effective drugs and vaccines gave rise to a wide variety of strategies employed to fight this worldwide pandemic. Many of these strategies rely on the repositioning of existing drugs that could shorten the time and reduce the cost compared to de novo drug discovery. In this study, we presented a new network-based algorithm for drug repositioning, called SAveRUNNER (Searching off-lAbel dRUg aNd NEtwoRk), which predicts drug-disease associations by quantifying the interplay between the drug targets and the disease-specific proteins in the human interactome via a novel network-based similarity measure that prioritizes associations between drugs and diseases locating in the same network neighborhoods. Specifically, we applied SAveRUNNER on a panel of 14 selected diseases with a consolidated knowledge about their disease-causing genes and that have been found to be related to COVID-19 for genetic similarity, comorbidity, or for their association to drugs tentatively repurposed to treat COVID-19. Focusing specifically on SARS subnetwork, we identified 282 repurposable drugs, including some the most rumored off-label drugs for COVID-19 treatments, as well as a new combination therapy of 5 drugs, actually used in clinical practice. Furthermore, to maximize the efficiency of putative downstream validation experiments, we prioritized 24 potential anti-SARS-CoV repurposable drugs based on their network-based similarity values. These top-ranked drugs include ACE-inhibitors, monoclonal antibodies, and thrombin inhibitors. Finally, our findings were in-silico validated by performing a gene set enrichment analysis, which confirmed that most of the network-predicted repurposable drugs may have a potential treatment effect against human coronavirus infections.