Correlation between vitamin D level and severity of prognostic markers in Egyptian COVID-19 patients: a cohort study

Abstract

The outbreak of coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19), which is caused by the highly contagious severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2), was announced a pandemic in March 2020 by the World Health Organization. The disease can be diagnosed on the basis of clinical symptoms, polymerase chain reaction positivity, and the presence of ground-glass opacities on computed tomography (CT) scans.Recent studies have focused on the role of serum inflammatory markers that predict COVID-19, such as lymphocyte counts and C-reactive protein (CRP), homocysteine, and D-dimer levels. Vitamin D is thought to reduce the risk of viral infections through several mechanisms.Our aim was to evaluate the correlation between serum vitamin D level and inflammatory markers and severity in Egyptian patients with COVID-19 infection. Serum vitamin D level had a positive correlation with hemoglobin level and lymphocytes.As results, serum vitamin D had a negative correlation with serum ferritin, CRP, and D-dimer and was not correlated with CORAD scoring in the CT chest.In conclusion, serum vitamin D was inversely correlated with inflammatory markers (ferritin, CRP, and D-dimer) which mean that participants with symptoms of COVID-19 had a high level of inflammatory markers and a low level of vitamin D.Participants without symptoms of COVID-19 had normal inflammatory markers and normal vitamin D level.

An investigation into the correlation of vitamin D status and management outcomes in patients with severe COVID-19 at a South African tertiary hospital

“…In addition, a low VitD level has been associated with elevated pro-inflammatory cytokines and has been demonstrated to be an independent predictor of COVID-19 severity [40] . This association was also demonstrated in an Egyptian cohort in which serum VitD was found to be inversely related to inflammatory markers such as ferritin in COVID-19 patients [41] . Other researchers have found serum VitD levels to be negatively correlated with ferritin among COVID-19 patients admitted to the ICU [13] .…”