Lung ultrasound in symptomatic COVID-19 patients (search done on 22 April 2020)
Citation: Mohamed MFH, Al-Shokri S, Yousaf Z, et al. Frequency of Abnormalities Detected by Point-of-Care Lung Ultrasound in Symptomatic COVID-19 Patients: Systematic Review and Meta-Analysis. The American Journal of Tropical Medicine and Hygiene. 2020 Jun 2:tpmd200371.
What is this? Various methods have been suggested for the diagnosis of COVID-19, including the use of lung ultrasound.
In this rapid review, the authors searched for case series and observational studies on the frequency of abnormalities detected by lung ultrasound in adult COVID-19 patients. They did not restrict their search by date and did the search on 22 April 2020. They included 6 observational studies and 1 case series (total: 122 patients). They assessed the included studies as moderate or unclear risk of bias, and noted that they were unable to rule out publication bias.
What was found: At the time of this review, the included studies showed that the most common finding on lung ultrasound for COVID-19 was evidence of interstitial lung involvement as depicted by the B-pattern, which was consistently found in a high proportion of patients.
At the time of this review, the included studies showed that other abnormalities such as pleural line abnormalities, pleural thickening and consolidations were highly variable across studies.
At the time of this review, the included studies showed that pleural effusion was found infrequently.
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