This article is a Preprint
Preprints are preliminary research reports that have not been certified by peer review. They should not be relied on to guide clinical practice or health-related behavior and should not be reported in news media as established information.
Preprints posted online allow authors to receive rapid feedback and the entire scientific community can appraise the work for themselves and respond appropriately. Those comments are posted alongside the preprints for anyone to read them and serve as a post publication assessment.
A simple laboratory parameter facilitates early identification of COVID-19 patients
Preprint
in English
| medRxiv
| ID: ppmedrxiv-20022830
ABSTRACT
The total number of COVID-19 patients since the outbreak of this infection in Wuhan, China has reached 40000 and are still growing. To facilitate triage or identification of the large number of COVID-19 patients from other patients with similar symptoms in designated fever clinics, we set to identify a practical marker that could be conveniently utilized by first-line health-care workers in clinics. To do so, we performed a case-control study by analyzing clinical and laboratory findings between PCR-confirmed SARS-CoV-2 positive patients (n=52) and SARS-CoV-2 negative patients (n=53). The patients in two cohorts all had similar symptoms, mainly fever and respiratory symptoms. The rates of patients with leukocyte counts (normal or decreased number) or lymphopenia (two parameters suggested by current National and WHO COVID-19 guidelines) had no differences between these two cohorts, while the rate of eosinopenia (decreased number of eosinophils) in SARS-CoV-2 positive patients (79%) was much higher than that in SARS-CoV-2 negative patients (36%). When the symptoms were combined with eosinopenia, this combination led to a diagnosis sensitivity and specificity of 79% and 64%, respectively, much higher than 48% and 53% when symptoms were combined with leukocyte counts (normal or decreased number) and/ or lymphopenia. Thus, our analysis reveals that eosinopenia may be a potentially more reliable laboratory predictor for SARS-CoV-2 infection than leukocyte counts and lymphopenia recommended by the current guidelines.
cc_no
Full text:
Available
Collection:
Preprints
Database:
medRxiv
Type of study:
Cohort_studies
/
Diagnostic study
/
Observational study
/
Prognostic study
Language:
English
Year:
2020
Document type:
Preprint