An in-depth appraisal of clinico-biochemical and radiological findings of COVID-19 patients during the COVID-19 pandemic in a dedicated COVID Care Hospital in Eastern India and its outcome in relation to the COVAXIN vaccination status: A 2-year study.

Introduction: COVID-19 pandemic hit Odisha province from April 2020 to December 2020, then from April 2021 to August 2021 and from February 2022 to April 2022 as the first, second, and third waves, respectively, with the most severe form witnessed during the second wave. Kalinga Institute of Medical Sciences hospital in Odisha was declared a Dedicated COVID Hospital (DCH) during those three waves and witnessed 9485 cases of admissions among which there were 1214 deaths. COVAXIN vaccination of the vulnerable population was launched in February 2021 onwards. This study has been done to know the clinic-biochemical profiles, radiologic findings of COVID-19 admitted patients, the predictors of mortality in the second wave, and clinical outcomes in the three waves in relation to COVAXIN vaccination status. Material and Methods: This was a serial three-round retrospective study from the electronic medical records using multistage random sampling where we collected and critically analyzed the demographic, and all the relevant possible health data of the cases that consist of 514 cases admitted in three waves. The data from death certificates among the 555 cases in the second wave have been analyzed to conclude predictors of mortality. Results: Mortality increased with age, male gender, comorbidities, and raised C-reactive protein level. High NL ratio, extent of pulmonary involvement. There was a wide variation in incidence and spectrum of illness starting from 79% incidence of mild symptomatic in the initial and third wave, but remained in the range of 35-65% in the second wave, respectively, and the most noticeable symptomatic illness was that of the upper respiratory tract. In fulminant cases, the mode of presentations was severe pneumonia and acute respiratory distress syndrome. Males were more sufferers than females. Children had better outcomes compared to adults. COVID-associated coagulopathy had a normal platelet count. Subsequently, in 2021 year onwards vaccination of the vulnerable population was launched in a phased manner that changed the dynamics of the disease outcome by better survival chances despite intercurrent COVID infection by induction of herd immunity. On the contrary, there was a higher prevalence of serious illness among non-vaccinated individuals. While the cases continued during the second wave of the pandemic, long COVID became a clinical entity of symptomatic that persisted or recurred among the COVID illness recovered cases after reverse transcriptase polymerase chain reaction results for COVID-19 became negative. The symptoms consisted of fatigue, cough, dyspnea as pulmonary manifestations and extra-pulmonary involvement of the cardiac, renal, and central nervous systems and the pulmonary imaging features consisted of interstitial pneumonia, consolidation, cavity pattern, and prone to microbial infection. These events lead to morbidity and admission. Coinciding with the vaccination of all population of Odisha province with the first dose of the vaccine by around the period of the first quarter of 2022, there was a new variant named Omicron responsible in the third wave, in which the majority of the admitted cases had.mild upper respiratory illness. This was not as lethal as its predecessors due to its lower propensity to invade the lungs and blood vessels. Conclusion: Immune dysregulation plays a central role in the pathogenesis of the manifestations. Vaccine-induced protection and the induction of herd immunity played a proactive role in the waning of the severity of clinical presentations.

Redefining Lobe-Wise Ground-Glass Opacity in COVID-19 Through Deep Learning and its Correlation With Biochemical Parameters.

During COVID-19 pandemic qRT-PCR, CT scans and biochemical parameters were studied to understand the patients' physiological changes and disease progression. There is a lack of clear understanding of the correlation of lung inflammation with biochemical parameters available. Among the 1136 patients studied, C-reactive-protein (CRP) is the most critical parameter for classifying symptomatic and asymptomatic groups. Elevated CRP is corroborated with increased D-dimer, Gamma-glutamyl-transferase (GGT), and urea levels in COVID-19 patients. To overcome the limitations of manual chest CT scoring system, we segmented the lungs and detected ground-glass-opacity (GGO) in specific lobes from 2D CT images by 2D U-Net-based deep learning (DL) approach. Our method shows accuracy, compared to the manual method (  âˆ¼ 80%), which is subjected to the radiologist's experience. We determined a positive correlation of GGO in the right upper-middle (0.34) and lower (0.26) lobe with D-dimer. However, a modest correlation was observed with CRP, ferritin and other studied parameters. The final Dice Coefficient (or the F1 score) and Intersection-Over-Union for testing accuracy are 95.44% and 91.95%, respectively. This study can help reduce the burden and manual bias besides increasing the accuracy of GGO scoring. Further study on geographically diverse large populations may help to understand the association of the biochemical parameters and pattern of GGO in lung lobes with different SARS-CoV-2 Variants of Concern's disease pathogenesis in these populations.

Supervised hospital based pulmonary rehabilitation outcome in long COVID-experience from a tertiary care hospital.

Introduction: Some patients suffer from various multisystem symptoms even after active process of COVID-19 illness has settled lasting more than four weeks called as long COVID. Pulmonary rehabilitation therapy is the proposed option in those patients. This study aims to study the impact of pulmonary rehabilitation on outcome of long COVID patients through improvement in mMRC dyspnea scale, oxygen saturation, cough score, six-minute walk distance and biomarkers of inflammation. Materials and Methods: A retrospective observational study was carried out from the data of electronic medical records among 71 Long COVID patients. Parameters like Spo2, MMRC scale, cough score, six-minute walking distance along with blood levels of D-dimer, C-reactive protein (CRP), leucocyte count at the time of admission and after three weeks of pulmonary rehabilitation were collected. The outcome among the patients was divided into full recovery and partial recovery group. Statistical analysis was done using SPSS software version 19.0. Result: Among 71 cases in our study 60 (84.50%) where male with mean age was 52.7 ± 13.23 years. Biomarkers like CRP and d-Dimer were elevated in 68 (95.7%) and 48 (67.6%) patients, respectively, at the time of admission. After 3 weeks of pulmonary rehabilitation mean SPO2, cough score, 6MWD showed significant improvement and normalization of biomarkers in recovered group of 61 out of 71 which was statistically significant. Conclusion: Significant improvement of oxygen saturation, mMRC grade, cough score, six-minute walk distance and normalization of biomarkers were marked following pulmonary rehabilitation. Thus, pulmonary rehabilitation therapy should be offered to all long COVID cases.

Clinical features and outcome of acute exacerbation in connective tissue disease-associated interstitial lung disease: A single-center study from India.

BACKGROUND: Acute exacerbation (AE) of idiopathic pulmonary fibrosis (IPF) is associated with high mortality, but there is limited clinical data on AE of interstitial lung disease (ILD) in connective tissue disease-associated ILD (CTD ILD). The present study was conducted to provide prevalence and clinical features of AE, as well as various risk factors associated with mortality among AE CTD ILD patients. METHODS: Between May 2013 and April 2018, 15 patients who developed AE among 105 consecutive patients with CTD with chronic ILD were included. AE was defined using the criteria recently proposed by the IPF net, with slight modification for adaptation to CVD-IP6 (collagen vascular disease-associated interstitial pneumonia), and patients having CTD with AE met all the criteria. RESULTS: Fifteen patients with mean age of 45.8 ± 13.9 years developed AE; the most common subgroup (n = 5, 33%) was systemic sclerosis. The mean duration (months) between diagnosis of ILD and AE was 56.5 ± 38.0 with mean follow-up duration of 24 ± 18.1 months. The baseline arterial oxygen pressure (PaO2 ) was 81.7 ± 8.1 mm Hg and mean forced vital capacity (%) was 57.9 ± 8.9. Five patients requiring mechanical ventilation died. Patients with shorter duration (months) of disease between onset of ILD to AE had higher mortality, 40.4 ± 45.1 vs 64.6 ± 33.6. Those who had significantly lower baseline PaO2 (mean ± SD), 72.6 ± 3.4 vs 86.2 ± 5.3 mm Hg (P = .002) had higher mortality. CONCLUSIONS: In our study, the majority of patients with AE CTD ILD had systemic sclerosis. Patients with lower baseline PaO2 and those requiring mechanical ventilation had higher mortality.