Introduction
Coronavirus disease-2019 (COVID-19) has resulted in considerable morbidity and mortality worldwide since December 2019. Clinical features of COVID-19 patients have recently been well described, and the existence of heart injury in these patients has been confirmed. A previous study reported that 12% of COVID-19 patients had related acute heart injury, accompanied by decreased ejection fraction (EF) and elevated troponin I (TnI)1. In another case series, the percentage of patients with acute cardiac injury and arrhythmia was even higher in severe COVID-19 patients (22.2% and 44.4%, respectively)2. It has been reported that cardiac injuries are common in critically ill patients with COVID-193; some case series reported a peak value of TnI exceeding 40-fold the normal value4. Nevertheless, information on cardiac injury in patients affected by COVID-19 is relatively limited at present.
There is a need to investigate prognostic markers for severe COVID-19 patients to provide important information for early therapeutic strategies. Echocardiography is a convenient and repeatable approach that allows control of cross-infection in the hospital and is suitable to examination in the ICU; thus, echocardiography has become an indispensable examination method for evaluating COVID-19 patients in ICU. This study therefore attempted to use echocardiographic measurements to predict the chance of weaning from mechanical ventilation in patients with critical COVID-19. Herein, we retrospectively analyzed clinical data from Shenzhen Third People’s Hospital, China, to explore the potential association between pulmonary artery systolic pressure (PASP), determined echocardiographically, and success to wean from mechanical ventilation in critically ill patients with COVID-19.