Association between clinical characteristics and laboratory findings of 102 patients with COVID-19 in Iraq

Background: The coronavirus epidemic (COVID-19) initially appeared in Wuhan, China in December, 2019 and then rapidly spread all over the world. The importance of information about the clinical and non-clinical characteristics of Iraqi COVID-19 patients was highlighted. The aim of this study was to investigate the demographic, clinical, and laboratory data of COVID-19 with assessed the influence of comorbidities on the severity of infections. Materials and Methods: We collected medical records of hospitalized 102 patients with COVID-19 at three hospitals from December 2021 to May 2022. Patients in the cohort study were diagnosed with positive COVID-19 by reverse transcription polymerase chain reaction according to nasopharyngeal samples. The cohort study was for separating two groups: non-severe and severe or critical groups. Results: The receiver operating characteristic (ROC) curve revealed that patients aged ≥ 48 years had higher levels of D-dimer, white blood cell (WBC) and neutrophils count (NUE), neutrophil-to-lymphocyte ratio (NLR), and platelets-to-lymphocyte ratio (PLR) when compared to non-severe patients. These parameters were used to predict high-risk patients with low lymphocyte counts. A logistic regression model generated results to include D-dimer, NUE, and lymphocytes count (LYM) were identified as independent risk factors for intensive care unit (ICU) patients of COVID-19 whereas WBC was a dependent factor with an odds ratio (8.330, 1.288, 0.225, and 1.534), respectively. Cut-off values by ROC curve for D-dimer, NUE, WBC, LYM, PLR, and NLR parameters were ≥ 0.780, ≥7.7, ≥10.5, ≥1.27, ≥200, and ≥5.4, respectively. Conclusion: In conclusion, this study demonstrated that COVID-19 severity can be predicted by analyzing clinical and laboratory data of patients. Comorbidities such as hypertension, diabetes mellitus, cardiac diseases, kidney diseases, malignancy, and hepatic diseases were identified as significant risk factors for COVID-19 severity and progression.