• Frequency of symptoms, clinical and paraclinical findings in dialysis patients with covid-19
  • Mahdi Rafiyan,1 Fatemeh Kourkinejad Gharaei,2 Maedeh Najafizadeh,3,* Seyed Masoud Moeinitaba,4
    1. Student research committee, Kashan university of medical science, Kashan, Iran
    2. Student research committee, Kashan university of medical science, Kashan, Iran
    3. Department of Infectious Disease, School of Medicine, Kashan University of Medical Sciences, Kashan, Iran
    4. Department of Internal Medicine, Kashan University of Medical Sciences, Kashan, Iran


  • Introduction: In 2019, covid-19 emerged as a virus targeted respiratory tract and led to the acute respiratory distress syndrome and death. Several risk factors have been recognized for this virus and one of the important ones is dialysis. Covid-19 is common among patients undergoing chronic dialysis and its mortality is exceeding beyond 20%. In this study, we aimed to investigate symptoms, clinical and paraclinical parameters among dialysis patients infected with covid-19 in Kashan, Iran.
  • Methods: This was a cross sectional study conducted on 67 dialysis patients from February 2020 until August 2020. A questionnaire with demographic information including underlying diseases and dialysis condition, symptoms, clinical and paraclinical parameters was completed for each patient. Patients whose infection with covid-19 was confirmed by PCR test included in this study and those who had an incomplete questionnaire were excluded from the study. Data were imported in SPSS version 21 and descriptive parameters such as mode, mean, median, and SD along with inferential parameters were analyzed.
  • Results: Among 67 patients, 40 were men and the rest(27) were women. The mean age was 60 years old. Among participants, 9(13.4%) were admitted to ICU and 19(28.4%) were died. The most common comorbidities were hypertension(79.1%), diabetes mellitus(55.2%), and cardiovascular diseases (25.4%), respectively. Exertional dyspnea(71.6%), fever(61.2%), myalgia(61.2%), and at rest dyspnea(52.2%) were the most common symptoms among these patients, respectively. In CT-scan findings, 73.1% of patients had unilateral lung involvement. Collectively, these results indicated that admission in ICU, hypertension, intubation, cardiovascular disease history, respiratory rate, lung involvement, SPO2, platelet count, CRP, and LDH had significant relationship with the patients outcome (p<0.05). Among these factors admission in ICU and intubation had stronger relation to final outcome of the patients as all(100%, p<0.001) of the patients admitted to ICU and 92.1(p<0.001) of patients who were intubated were died. Death rate among patients who were not admitted to ICU and who were not intubated were 17.2 and 11.3%, respectively. Furthermore, Reduction of one percent in SPO2 could increase the chance of death by 16.5%. Additionally, SPO2 and intubation could change patient prognosis about 45.7% to 65.6%.
  • Conclusion: Taken all together, ICU admission, intubation and SPO2 had strong relationship to the patient prognosis as the change of these parameters especially SPO2 and intubation could change prognosis more significantly.
  • Keywords: hemodialysis, covid-19, paraclinical findings, symptoms