Study of the Treatment and Outcomes in Critically Ill Patients With COVID-19 and High Risk of Acute Kidney Injury

Since the outbreak of coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) began in December 2019 in China, over 1 million people have been infected and over 55,000 have died worldwide, and these numbers continue to rise. Combating this pandemic requires a multidisciplinary approach from the medical research community, including translational studies to understand the pathogenesis of disease, randomized controlled trials of novel and re-purposed pharmacotherapies, and rigorously conducted epidemiologic studies that include granular patient-level data.

Current knowledge of the clinical features and outcomes of COVID-19 is mostly limited to studies from China and Italy. In one of the larger such studies, which consisted of 1099 patients hospitalized in mainland China, only 173 (16%) were classified as having severe disease, and only 15 (1.4%) died. The study was therefore inadequately powered to determine independent risk factors for death. A larger study consisting of 72,314 patients was recently published by the Chinese Center for Disease Control and Prevention. This nationwide registry study identified several important findings, including the striking monotonic relationship between older age and greater risk of death. Important limitations of the study, however, were lack of granular patient-level data and relatively few patients (<5% of the cohort) who were critically ill. Among critically ill patients with COVID-19, acute mortality rates have been reported to be as high as 49-62%, underscoring the importance of studying this patient population. Data from the United Kingdom (UK) suggest that >50% of critically ill patients have a degree of acute kidney injury (AKI) and >20% need renal replacement therapy (RRT). Mortality is particularly high in those who are mechanically ventilated and need RRT (>75%).

Detailed information about the risk of AKI, contributing factors and reasons for high mortality in critically ill COVID-19 patients is lacking. To meet this urgent need, the investigators plan to collect clinical data from >250 critically ill patients with COVID-19 admitted to the intensive care unit (ICU) at Guy's & St Thomas' Hospital. The investigators will collaborate with Dr Gupta and Prof Leaf from Harvard Medical School, Boston (US) who are leading a similar study across >50 sites in the United States.

The aim is to describe the epidemiology and determine the independent risk factors for mortality and acute organ injury in AKI and to assess the impact of different treatment strategies on survival. This will allow the development of prevention strategies and design of appropriately powered intervention studies.