Every month I read an open-access article. I share the title and associated link with my followers to encourage clinicians to read more articles, stay up to date, and continue to grow.
The objective of this month’s paper is to [conduct a comprehensive systematic review, critical appraisal and meta-analysis of all prognostic factories in patients with COVID-19] (p2).
Prognostic factors for adverse outcomes in patients with COVID-19: a field-wide systematic review and meta-analysis
By Vanesa Bellou, Ioanna Tzoulaki, Maarten van Smeden, Karel G.M. Moons, Evangelos Evangelou and Lazaros Belbasis
European Respiratory Journal 2022 59: 2002964; DOI: 10.1183/13993003.02964-2020 https://erj.ersjournals.com/content/59/2/2002964
Link to the article: https://erj.ersjournals.com/content/erj/59/2/2002964.full.pdf
The reasons I found this article interesting
- The authors emphasized the importance of “adequate and transparent reporting of methodology and findings in future studies to improve the applicability of the evidence” (p8). More on that under the ‘Recommendations and policy implications’ on page eight.
- This study address many prognostic factors and narrow down to a few such as age, sex and smoking history (p7).
- The authors further discuss some of the predictors such as dyspnea and hospitality rate, oxygen saturation and mortality, and smoking and clinical deterioration (p7).
- Also, some of the medications and their prognostic factors were highlighted. E.g. ACEi, ARBs, immunosuppressive medications etc.
Happy reading and learning,
Farzad Refahi
March 2, 2022
Let’s read an article a month – March 2022