A New Predictor of Disease Severity in Patients with COVID-19 in Wuhan, China
Abstract Background Severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) broke out in Wuhan, Hubei, China. This study sought to elucidate a novel predictor of disease severity in patients with coronavirus disease-19 (COVID-19) cased by SARS-CoV-2.Methods Patients enrolled in this study were all hospitalized with COVID-19 in the Central Hospital of Wuhan, China. Clinical features, chronic comorbidities, demographic data, and laboratory and radiological data were reviewed. The outcomes of patients with severe pneumonia and those with non-severe pneumonia were compared to explore risk factors. The receiver operating characteristic curve was used to screen optimal predictors from the risk factors and the predictive power was verified by internal validation.Results A total of 377 patients diagnosed with COVID-19 were enrolled in this study, including 117 with severe pneumonia and 260 with non-severe pneumonia. The independent risk factors for severe pneumonia were age, N/L, CRP and D-dimer. We identified a product of N/L*CRP*D-dimer as having an important predictive value for the severity of COVID-19. The cutoff value was 5.32. The negative predictive value of less than 5.32 for the N/L*CRP*D-dimer was 93.75%, while the positive predictive value was 46.03% in the test sets. In the training sets, the negative and positive predictive values were 93.80% and 41.32%.Conclusions A product of N/L*CRP*D-dimer may be an important predictor of disease severity in patients with COVID-19.