Characteristics and Outcomes of Patients Admitted to Swedish Intensive Care Units for COVID-19

Plain-language summary

This is a registry-based cohort study of all adult patients (≥18 years) admitted to Swedish Intensive Care Units with confirmed SARS-CoV-2 infection and COVID-19 disease during the first 2 months of the 2020 pandemic. The main goal is to describe demographic characteristics, coexisting conditions, treatments and outcomes among critically ill patients with COVID-19. A secondary goal is to identify independent risk factors associated with increased mortality for these patients. Data regarding baseline characteristics including comorbidities, intensive care treatments and outcomes will be extracted. ICU lengths of stay and 30-day mortalities will be calculated. The primary outcome is 30-day all-cause mortality. THIS PART OF THE STUDY HAS BEEN COMPLETED. UPDATE 26 Feb 2022: Characteristics and outcomes of 'first wave' patients admitted to Swedish ICUs was published in Eur J Anaesthesiol. 2021 Apr 1;38(4):335-343. doi: 10.1097/EJA.0000000000001459. A description of the surge response and aggregated data outcomes in Scandinavian countries was published in https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/aas.13983. UPDATE 13 Nov 2024: ADDITIONAL SUMMARY - EXTENDED INCLUSION PERIOD AND ADDITION OF LONG-TERM OUTCOMES, AND CRITICALLY ILL PATIENTS WITH INFLUENZA AND VIRAL PNEUMONITIS Due to the continued influx of patients requiring intensive care due to COVID-19, we extended the inclusion period to 31 Dec 2022. Thus this new cohort will include all patients admitted to ICUs in Sweden from 6 March 2020 to 31 Dec 2022. We will investigate short (30day mortality) and long-term outcomes (365d mortality and cardiovascular complications) of patients admitted to Swedish ICUs with confirmed SARS-CoV-2 infection and COVID-19 disease. In international research, the long-term effects of ICU-requiring COVID-19 are now highly topical. Long-term follow-up exceeding one year has not yet been conducted on any Swedish material. To concretely understand the actual implications of long-term outcomes, it is becoming almost standard to compare this patient group to ICU-requiring influenza + viral pneumonitis patients to some extent. We have applied for and obtained ethical approval to include this group as a potential comparator to COVID-19 patients. However, such comparisons require careful consideration of potential confounders, such as patient characteristics and socioeconomic factors. It is therefore crucial to both establish the disease burden for the population and relate it to a comparable patient group. Ethical approval and national data linkage approvals have now been obtained to extract this data from Statistics Sweden and the Swedish National Board of Health and Welfare registries. Data linkage was completed in October 2024.

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