Faiza Saeed*, Ashar Alam, Shoukat Memon, Javeria Chughtai, Shahzad Ahmed, Sobia Tariq, Beena Salman, Salman Imtiaz
Background: Imbalance of serum sodium in the form of hypo and hypernatremia has negative prognostic impact, and is linked with increase in morbidity and mortality. COVID 19 is a deadly viral infection, and can be complicated with either of the two states. This increases the complications associated with the COVID 19 infection.
Material and methods: This is an observational cohort study, conducted at The Indus Hospital Karachi, from March 2020 to September 2020. All patients were divided into three groups on the basis of their serum sodium level, and distribution of variables was observed in all these three groups. To observe the effect of dysnatremias on outcome, binary logistic regression was run and odds ratios with 95% confidence interval were obtained.
Results: We included 655 patients, in which 70.7% were male, while 29.3% were female. Mean age was 54 ± 15.5 with minimum of 1 year and maximum of 95 year. Hyponatremia was more common 154(23.5%) than hypernatremia 79(12.1%). Dysnatremia were common in patients of age group of 51-65 years (Hyponatremia 72(46.8%) hypernatremia 36(45.6%). Hyponatremia didn’t show any significant effect on the clinical manifestation, critical illness and outcome of the patients except drowsiness (p=0.022). On the other hand hypernatremia had highly significant effect on clinical manifestation, critical illness and outcome of the patients. The patients who had hypernatremia died 16.8 times more than patients with normal sodium (p=0.001).
Conclusion: Dysnatremias has profound impact on the outcome of COVID-19 patients. We found development of hypernatremia has devastating effect on patient survival.