Different laboratory abnormalities in COVID-19 patients with hypertension or diabetes

Abstract

The pandemic of COVID-19 has placed an enormous burden on health authorities across the world. The symptoms of COVID-19 range from mild to life-threatening. Those who are elderly or have pre-existing health issues like hypertension or diabetes are more likely to develop severe disease. To understand why patients with hypertension and diabetes yield poorer clinical outcomes than those without, 99 patients with laboratory-confirmed moderate or severe COVID-19 were recruited and factors that associate with their preexisting health issues were explored using appropriate statistical methods. In our analysis, we found HRCT peak scores for hypertensive or diabetic COVID-19 patients were higher compared to those without (P < 0.05), which confirmed an increased disease severity in COVID-19 patients with hypertension or diabetes. Most interestingly, in laboratory findings on admission, we found white blood cell counts (P = 0.035), neutrophil counts (P = 0.045), D-dimer (P = 0.017) and lactate dehydrogenase (LDH) (P = 0.007) were all increased in hypertensive COVID-19 patients compared to non-hypertensive ones; while lymphocyte count was not significantly changed in hypertensive COVID-19 patients (P = 0.260). In contrast, there was a significant decrease in lymphocyte count in COVID-19 patients with diabetes compared with those without (P = 0.019); while changes in white blood cell counts, neutrophil counts, D-dimer and LDH were not significant (P > 0.05) in COVID-19 patients with diabetes. These results suggest different mechanisms exist for hypertension or diabetes as risk factors for severe cases of COVID-19, which might shed light on future mechanistic studies.

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Identifiers

ORCID for Yilu Zhou: orcid.org/0000-0002-4090-099X

ORCID for Robert Ewing: orcid.org/0000-0001-6510-4001

ORCID for Yihua Wang: orcid.org/0000-0001-5561-0648

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