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.