Affiliation:
1. Brain and Spinal Cord Injury Research Center, Neuroscience Institute Tehran University of Medical Sciences Tehran Iran
2. Health Information Management and Medical Informatics Department, School of Allied Medical Sciences Tehran University of Medical Sciences Tehran Iran
3. School of Medicine Tehran University of Medical Sciences Tehran Iran
4. Department of Anesthesiology, Imam Khomeini Hospital Complex Tehran University of Medical Sciences Tehran Iran
Abstract
AbstractBackground and AimsCOVID‐19 patients might be admitted to the hospital based on their clinical manifestations or to the intensive care unit (ICU) due to the severity of their symptoms or critical situation. Our main objective was to investigate clinical and demographic factors influencing COVID‐19 patients' admission to the ICU and length of stay (LOS) using extracted data from the hospital information systems in Iran.MethodsThe data of hospitalized patients with confirmed COVID‐19 were retrieved from the health information system of Imam Khomeini Hospital Complex, Tehran, Iran between March 2020 and February 2022. The primary outcome was the ICU admission, and the secondary outcome was the LOS. The correlation analysis between laboratory findings and demographic data with ICU admission and LOS was done using SPSS 21.0, and p < 0.05 was considered significant.ResultsOf all the 4156 patients, 2391 (57.5%) were male and the mean age was 58.69 ± 8.19 years. Of these, 9.5% of patients were admitted to ICU at any time point during their hospital stay. Age and laboratory variables such as neutrophil‐to‐lymphocyte ratio (NLR), ALT (U/L), albumin (g/dL), plasma glucose (mg/dL), ferritin levels (ng/mL), and phosphorous levels (mg/dL) shown the significant relationship with ICU admission. Also, being a smoker and having hypoxemia had a significant relationship with longer stays in the hospital. In this study, we validated a cut‐off value of 4.819 for NLR, calculated at hospitalization, as a useful predictor of disease progression and occurrence of serious clinical outcomes, such as ICU admission.ConclusionThe study examined various clinical factors associated with ICU admission in COVID‐19 patients. The findings suggest that certain factors can increase the risk of ICU admission and influence the length of hospital stay which should be focused in future studies.