Huh.
From Northwestern University via SciTechDaily, May 6:
Machine learning finds no evidence of cytokine storm in critically ill patients with COVID-19.
- No evidence of cytokine storm in critically ill patients with COVID-19
- Nearly half of patients with COVID-19 develop a secondary bacterial pneumonia
- Crucial to find and aggressively treat secondary bacterial pneumonia in ICU patients
Secondary bacterial infection of the lung (pneumonia) was extremely common in patients with COVID-19, affecting almost half the patients who required support from mechanical ventilation. By applying machine learning to medical record data, scientists at Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine have found that secondary bacterial pneumonia that does not resolve was a key driver of death in patients with COVID-19, results published in The Journal of Clinical Investigation.
Bacterial infections may even exceed death rates from the viral infection itself, according to the findings. The scientists also found evidence that COVID-19 does not cause a “cytokine storm,” so often believed to cause death.
“Our study highlights the importance of preventing, looking for, and aggressively treating secondary bacterial pneumonia in critically ill patients with severe pneumonia, including those with COVID-19,” said senior author Benjamin Singer, MD, the Lawrence Hicks Professor of Pulmonary Medicine in the Department of Medicine and a Northwestern Medicine pulmonary and critical care physician.
The investigators found nearly half of patients with COVID-19 develop a secondary ventilator-associated bacterial pneumonia.
“Those who were cured of their secondary pneumonia were likely to live, while those whose pneumonia did not resolve were more likely to die,” Singer said. “Our data suggested that the mortality related to the virus itself is relatively low, but other things that happen during the ICU stay, like secondary bacterial pneumonia, offset that.”
The study findings also negate the cytokine storm theory, said Singer, also a professor of Biochemistry and Molecular Genetics....
....MUCH MORE
