Covid blood test can predict patient survival chances

[nitpicker]

Covid blood test can predict patient survival chances

Linda Geddes
Mon 7 Dec 2020 11.26 GMT

A blood test has been developed that can predict whether Covid patients will need intensive care – or are even likely to survive – shortly after they develop symptoms.

If validated in real-life hospital settings, the test could enable doctors to direct life-saving treatment to the most needy patients sooner, boosting their chances of survival. It could also bolster doctors’ confidence in the face of difficult decisions, such as whether to offer palliative care or an ICU bed when hospitals are close to capacity.

Earlier this year, Markus Ralser and colleagues identified 27 proteins in the blood of Covid-19 patients that were present at different levels depending on the severity of their symptoms. Since then, they have followed 160 Covid patients whose blood was tested when they were admitted to hospital to explore whether its protein signature could predict the progression of their illness.

The idea is to provide doctors with a “digital picture” of how sick a patient is – something you cannot necessarily tell just by looking at them – which could help inform their treatment. For instance, in Covid-19, a phenomenon called happy hypoxia means a patient can feel relatively OK but then rapidly deteriorate.
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Although it is unlikely that a blood test alone would ever be used to dictate which patients are allocated scant intensive care unit beds, it could provide additional data to help inform doctors making these hard decisions.

The proteins were measured using an instrument called a mass spectrometer, which can detect the presence and abundance of hundreds to thousands of proteins in a sample, based on their mass.

Such proteomic analysis enables many more proteins to be measured in blood than with current clinical assays, according to Manuel Mayr, a British Heart Foundation professor of cardiovascular proteomics at King’s College London, who was not involved in the study. “This can reveal important insights why some Covid-19 patients may have a better or worse prognosis,” he added.

So far, the test has been validated in a further 24 severely ill patients, where it correctly predicted the outcome for 18 of 19 of those who survived and for five of five patients who died.
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The next step is to validate the test in hospitals in the UK, US and Germany. These studies are expected to begin in the coming weeks and the data from them would then have to be submitted to health regulators, before the tests could become more widely available.
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[get the red out]

1. Dose the body produce the proteins?

Or are they from the virus? I had Covid-19 a couple of weeks ago and was incredibly fortunate that my experience was pretty much like a common flu. I am 56, and have always seemed to have a good immune system (as I said, fortunate). I have mulled the fact that my Papaw survived the 1918 flu when he was 6 yrs old and wondered if my luck came from some genes?