A third of Covid patients end up back in hospital
... AND MORE THAN ONE IN 10 DIE AFTER THEY ARE DISCHARGED
NEARLY a third of Covid-19 patients treated in hospital need to be readmitted within a month of being sent home, the results of a new study led by the University of Leicester suggest.
More than one in 10 died after they had been discharged, according to the findings of researchers who examined data on almost 48,000 patients admitted to hospital with coronavirus and sent home before August 31, last year.
The analysis, published in the British Medical Journal (BMJ) found that hospital patients with Covid-19 have “increased rates of multiorgan dysfunction” compared with the general population.
It concluded that people who have post-Covid syndrome need to get “integrated rather than organ or disease specific” care. The investigation also looked at information on the same number of people – or so-called “matched controls” – who had not been admitted to hospital. University experts examined whether people needed to be readmitted, death rates and diagnoses of respiratory, cardiovascular, metabolic, kidney and liver diseases.
After an average follow-up period of 140 days, nearly a third – or 14,060 of 47,780 – were readmitted.
And during the follow-up period more than one in 10 (5,875) died after discharge. Rates of respiratory disease, diabetes and cardiovascular disease were also significantly raised in Covid-19 patients, the authors said.
The rate of multi-organ dysfunction after discharge was greater among patients under the age of 70 compared with those over 70, they found, and the rate was higher in ethnic minority groups than in the white population.
The authors called for more research to be done to “establish risk factors”.
“Individuals discharged from hospital after acute Covid-19 had an increased risk of mortality, readmission, and multiorgan dysfunction compared with similar individuals in the general population,” they wriote.
“And the relative increase in risk was not confined to the elderly and was not uniform across ethnic groups.
“Urgent research is needed to understand the risk factors for post-Covid syndrome so that treatment can be targeted better to demographically and clinically at risk populations.”
Urgent research is needed to understand the risk factors for postCovid syndrome.
Leicester University experts