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Common health issues raise risk for severe COVID-19

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Reuters
Reuters
Reuters is an international news organisation owned by Thomson Reuters

Common conditions that put people at risk for serious illnesses like diabetes, heart attack and stroke also put them at risk for critical illness and death from COVID-19, researchers have found.

When the conditions – high blood sugar, high blood pressure, obesity, and high cholesterol – occur together, they are collectively known as metabolic syndrome.

Using data on hospitalized COVID-19 patients in 26 countries, researchers compared 5,069 adults with at least three of the conditions and 23,917 without metabolic syndrome.

Those with metabolic syndrome had significantly increased odds of a potentially fatal lung condition called acute respiratory distress syndrome (ARDS) and death, the researchers reported on Wednesday in JAMA Network Open.

“With each metabolic syndrome criterion added from 1 to 4 criteria, the risk of ARDS significantly increased,” regardless of age, sex, race, ethnicity, and other illnesses, researchers said.

“If you have high cholesterol, high blood pressure, mild obesity and pre-diabetes or diabetes and are hospitalized with COVID-19, you have a one-in-four chance of developing ARDS, which is significant,” study leader Dr. Joshua Denson of Tulane University School of Medicine said in a statement.

Metabolic syndrome was significantly more common among patients in U.S. hospitals (18.8%) than in other countries (8%), leading the researchers to suggest that one reason the United States leads the world in COVID-19 deaths could be its high rates of metabolic syndrome, obesity and diabetes.

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