Overweight and Obesity Are Associated With Acute Kidney Injury and Acute Respiratory Distress Syndrome, but Not With Increased Mortality in Hospitalized COVID-19 Patients: A Retrospective Cohort Study.

Objective: To evaluate the association between overweight and obesity on the clinical course and outcomes in patients hospitalized with COVID-19. Design: Retrospective, observational cohort study. Methods: We performed a multicenter, retrospective, observational cohort study of hospitalized COVID-19 patients to evaluate the associations between overweight and obesity on the clinical course and outcomes. Results: Out of 1634 hospitalized COVID-19 patients, 473 (28.9%) had normal weight, 669 (40.9%) were overweight, and 492 (30.1%) were obese. Patients who were overweight or had obesity were younger, and there were more women in the obese group. Normal-weight patients more often had pre-existing conditions such as malignancy, or were organ recipients. During admission, patients who were overweight or had obesity had an increased probability of acute respiratory distress syndrome [OR 1.70 (1.26-2.30) and 1.40 (1.01-1.96)], respectively and acute kidney failure [OR 2.29 (1.28-3.76) and 1.92 (1.06-3.48)], respectively. Length of hospital stay was similar between groups. The overall in-hospital mortality rate was 27.7%, and multivariate logistic regression analyses showed that overweight and obesity were not associated with increased mortality compared to normal-weight patients. Conclusion: In this study, overweight and obesity were associated with acute respiratory distress syndrome and acute kidney injury, but not with in-hospital mortality nor length of hospital stay.

Predicting mortality of individual patients with COVID-19: a multicentre Dutch cohort.

OBJECTIVE: Develop and validate models that predict mortality of patients diagnosed with COVID-19 admitted to the hospital. DESIGN: Retrospective cohort study. SETTING: A multicentre cohort across 10 Dutch hospitals including patients from 27 February to 8 June 2020. PARTICIPANTS: SARS-CoV-2 positive patients (age ≥18) admitted to the hospital. MAIN OUTCOME MEASURES: 21-day all-cause mortality evaluated by the area under the receiver operator curve (AUC), sensitivity, specificity, positive predictive value and negative predictive value. The predictive value of age was explored by comparison with age-based rules used in practice and by excluding age from the analysis. RESULTS: 2273 patients were included, of whom 516 had died or discharged to palliative care within 21 days after admission. Five feature sets, including premorbid, clinical presentation and laboratory and radiology values, were derived from 80 features. Additionally, an Analysis of Variance (ANOVA)-based data-driven feature selection selected the 10 features with the highest F values: age, number of home medications, urea nitrogen, lactate dehydrogenase, albumin, oxygen saturation (%), oxygen saturation is measured on room air, oxygen saturation is measured on oxygen therapy, blood gas pH and history of chronic cardiac disease. A linear logistic regression and non-linear tree-based gradient boosting algorithm fitted the data with an AUC of 0.81 (95% CI 0.77 to 0.85) and 0.82 (0.79 to 0.85), respectively, using the 10 selected features. Both models outperformed age-based decision rules used in practice (AUC of 0.69, 0.65 to 0.74 for age >70). Furthermore, performance remained stable when excluding age as predictor (AUC of 0.78, 0.75 to 0.81). CONCLUSION: Both models showed good performance and had better test characteristics than age-based decision rules, using 10 admission features readily available in Dutch hospitals. The models hold promise to aid decision-making during a hospital bed shortage.