Electrolyte levels and severe COVID-19 (search done on 23 March 2020)
Citation: Lippi G, South AM, Henry BM. Electrolyte imbalances in patients with severe coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19). Annals of Clinical Biochemistry. 2020 May;57(3):262-5.
What is this? Information on the electrolyte levels of COVID-19 patients may be helpful when assessing disease severity, defining prognosis and guiding treatment.
In this pooled analysis, the authors searched for articles reporting data on serum electrolytes in patients with COVID-19. They did not restrict their searches by language of publication and searched for articles published between December 2019 and 23 March 2020. They included 5 studies (1415 participants), which were all from China.
What was found: At the time of the review, the included studies found that severe COVID-19 infection was associated with lower serum concentrations of sodium, potassium and calcium.