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Latest Prevention & Wellness News<\/h3>\n
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![\"News](\"https:\/\/media.healthday.com\/Images\/icimages\/40245.jpg\"\/)
By E.J. Mundell<\/b>
HealthDay Reporter<\/i><\/p>\n
WEDNESDAY, Sept. 23, 2020 (HealthDay News)<\/p>\n
If you’re unfortunate enough to be admitted to the hospital with COVID-19<\/a>, a common blood marker may predict how severe your illness might become, new research shows.<\/p>\n The blood marker is called “red cell distribution width<\/a>” (RDW) — basically, the greater the variance in the size of red blood cells<\/a>, the poorer a patient’s prognosis, the study authors explained.<\/p>\n A COVID-19<\/a> patient’s RDW test<\/a> result “was highly correlated with patient mortality, and the correlation persisted when controlling for other identified risk factors like patient age, some other lab tests and some pre-existing illnesses,” said study co-author Dr. Jonathan Carlson, of Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH) in Boston.<\/p>\n The new study was published online Sept. 23 in JAMA Network Open<\/i> and was led by Dr. John Higgins, a pathologist investigator at the hospital and associate professor of systems biology at Harvard Medical School.<\/p>\n “We wanted to help find ways to identify high-risk COVID patients as early and as easily as possible — who is likely to become severely ill and may benefit from aggressive interventions, and which hospitalized patients are likely to get worse most quickly,” Higgins said in a hospital news release.<\/p>\n To do so, they looked at blood tests for more than 1,600 adults diagnosed with SARS<\/a>-CoV-2 infection who’d been admitted to one of four Boston-area hospitals in March and April 2020.<\/p>\n Higgins and his team had expected that they might have to ferret out some obscure blood marker that might predict poor outcomes from COVID-19<\/a>. But they quickly discovered that RDW — already used in standard blood tests — easily fit the bill.<\/p>\n In fact, patients whose RDW values were above the normal range when they were first admitted to the hospital had a risk of death that was 2.7 times that of patients whose test results were in the normal range, the researchers found. Overall, 31% of patients with above-normal RDW test<\/a> results died, compared to 11% of those with normal RDW test results.<\/p>\n And if a patient’s RDW rate was normal upon admission but then slowly began to rise to above-normal levels, that correlated with a rise in the patient’s odds for death as well, the study found.<\/p>\n The next step for the Boston team is to discover why a high RDW score is tied to worse outcomes. “Such discoveries could point to new treatment strategies or identify better markers of disease severity,” said study co-author Dr. Aaron Aguirre, an MGH cardiologist and critical care physician.<\/p>\n Dr. Teresa Murray Amato is chair of emergency medicine<\/a> at Long Island Jewish Forest Hills, in New York City. Reading over the new study, she said that “although we know that advanced age and certain [health factors] such as diabetes<\/a> and hypertension<\/a> are associated with worse outcomes, there is still great variability of symptoms and severity within those groups.”<\/p>\n A blood marker like RDW that could pinpoint at-risk patients would be very useful, Amato said.<\/p>\n Already, “an elevated RDW can be an indication of overall poor health” in any hospital patient, she noted. Knowing soon after hospital admission that a patient is or is not at a high risk of death, “we will be better at tailoring treatment in a scientific way, in order to give our patients the best possible outcomes,” Amato said.<\/p>\n ![\"MedicalNews\"](\"https:\/\/images.medicinenet.com\/images\/HealthDay\/healthday.png\")
Copyright \u00a9 2020 HealthDay. All rights reserved.<\/p>\n
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