Patients hospitalized with omicron variant were less likely to develop AKI
Click Here to Manage Email Alerts
Key takeaways:
- Patients hospitalized with omicron who required ICU admission were less likely to develop AKI.
- There was no difference in risk of death from AKI in patients with the omicron variant vs. previous variants.
SAN DIEGO — Patients who were hospitalized during the omicron variant wave were less likely to develop AKI compared with patients who had previous waves of SARS-CoV-2 infection, according to data presented at ASN Kidney Week, here.
“Nearly 5 years into the COVID pandemic, while variants have become more transmissible and less severe, it’s crucial to consider their impact on kidney health and the high mortality rates among COVID-AKI patients,” Pedro Franca Gois, MD, PhD, FRACP, FASN, an associate professor at the University of Queensland and research fellow at Royal Brisbane and Women’s Hospital, told Healio.
In the prospective, observational, multinational study, Gois and Danyang Dai, a doctoral student at the University of Queensland, researched the prevalence of AKI among critically ill patients in the ICU during the omicron surge. Overall, 3,908 patients in six countries were studied from June 2021 to October 2022, with 3,203 patients classified from pre-omicron variants and 705 patients had the omicron variant.
Researchers used the International Severe Acute Respiratory and Emerging Infection Consortium COVID-19 global dataset and defined AKI by Kidney Disease: Improving Global Outcomes serum creatinine criteria within 7 days of hospitalization with at least two serum creatine measurements taken.
Gois said the results showed patients hospitalized with the omicron variant who required ICU admission were less likely to develop AKI compared with patients who had earlier COVID-19 variants, after controlling for demographic and clinical factors.
The prevalence of AKI was 24.7% for patients with the omicron variant and 22.9% for patients with previous variants (P = .32). Additionally, researchers found that the use of dialysis was 45% for patients with the omicron variant and 52% for patients with previous variants (P = .15).
“Additionally, ICU patients with omicron were older and had more comorbidities. There was no difference in the risk of death from AKI between omicron patients and those with previous variants,” Gois said. “The Kaplan-Meier curve shows that ICU patients with omicron who did not develop AKI had a higher survival rate. However, for those who did develop AKI, survival rates were similar between omicron and earlier variants.”
Collapse
Read more about
Click Here to Manage Email Alerts