Coronavirus Disease 2019-Related Acute Ischemic Stroke: A Case Report

Sociodemographic Factors, Comorbidities, In-Hospital Complications, and Outcomes of Ischaemic Stroke Patients in the Context of the COVID-19 Pandemic in Lithuania: A Retrospective, Record-Based, Single-Centre Study

INTRODUCTION

The role of COVID-19 regarding in-hospital complications and poor outcomes for patients with ischaemic stroke (IS) is still important to explore. The aim of this study was to evaluate the risk of in-hospital lethality for IS patients respectively to their comorbidities and in-hospital complications in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic.

METHODS

We identified 1898 acute IS patients (749 men and 1149 women) admitted to the Lithuanian University of Health Sciences Kaunas Hospital, Lithuania, from December 2020 to February 2022. The sociodemographic, clinical, and outcome features of the patients were evaluated deploying appropriate statistical tests. Hazard ratios and 95% confidence intervals were estimated by the Cox proportional hazards regression for hospital lethality.

RESULTS

The risk of in-hospital lethality was 2.22 times higher in men suffering from IS and chronic ischaemic heart disease (cIHD) compared to those with IS and isolated arterial hypertension (iAH) (p < 0.05). COVID-19 elevated the risk of in-hospital lethality in men by 3.16 times (p < 0.05). In comorbid women with type two diabetes mellitus (DM) or cIHD, the risk of in-hospital lethality was two times higher compared to those with iAH (p < 0.05). The risk of in-hospital lethality increased significantly in both men and women, with the total number of in-hospital complications increasing per one unit.

CONCLUSIONS

Of the comorbidities studied, DM and cIHD together with COVID-19 elevated the risk of in-hospital lethality significantly. Within the acute in-hospital complications, pneumonia with respiratory failure and acute renal failure showed the most significant prognostic value anticipating lethal outcomes for IS patients.

Global research trends in COVID-19 with MRI and PET/CT: a scoping review with bibliometric and network analyses

Objective

To identify and evaluate the indexed studies that allow us to understand the implications of imaging studies in MRI and PET/CT related to COVID-19 research.

Methods

Scoping review. Articles in PubMed, Scopus, and Web of Science (WoS) were scanned from 2019 to 2021 with COVID-19, MRI, and PET-CT as keywords. EndNote software and manual checking removed the duplicated references. Our assessment includes citation, bibliometric, keyword network, and statistical analyses using descriptive statistics and correlations. Highlighted variables were publication year, country, journals, and authorship.

Results

Only 326 papers were included. The most cited article reached 669 cites; this number represented 21.71% of 3081 citations. The top-15 cited authors received 1787 citations, which represented 58% of the total cites. These authors had affiliations from ten countries (Belgium, China, France, Italy, Japan, Spain, Sweden, Turkey, United Kingdom (UK), and the USA). The top-30 journals were cited 2762 times, representing 89.65% of the total cites. Only five journals were cited more than 100 times; Int J Infect Dis had the most significant number of citations (674). Some of the unexpected keywords were encephalitis, stroke, microbleeds, myocarditis.

Conclusion

COVID-19 pandemic is still spreading worldwide, and the knowledge about its different facets continues advancing. MRI and PET/CT are being used in more than 50% of the selected studies; research trends span seven categories, no only the diagnostic but others like socio-economic impact and pathogenesis Developed countries had an advantage by having hospitals with more resources, including MRI and PET/CT facilities in the same institution to supplement basic assessment in patients with COVID-19.

Supplementary Information

The online version contains supplementary material available at 10.1007/s40336-021-00460-x.