When it comes to patients who test positive for COVID, the absence of symptoms does not mean there will be no negative health outcomes.
Scientists say it was “shocking” to find “that just having the virus in the body could potentially cause more complications” in some patients.
According to research findings described at the Scientific Forum of the American College of Surgeons (ACS) Clinical Congress 2022, trauma patients who test positive for COVID but have no symptoms have significantly higher rates of cardiac events, stay in the hospital longer, and have higher hospital bills than similar trauma patients who test negative for COVID.
Just having the virus in the body could potentially cause more complications in trauma patients
For study coauthor Lydia Lam, it was “shocking” to find “that just having the virus in the body could potentially cause more complications in trauma patients”.
She said that just because a COVID-positive person has no symptoms does not mean that there are no health effects.
Dr. Lam and colleagues at the LAC+USC Medical Center evaluated the COVID status of all trauma patients admitted to their urban Level 1 trauma center during the initial pandemic wave (March 2020 to October 2021), with the exception of all symptomatic positive patients.
Each trauma patient who tested positive for COVID was matched to three COVID-negative trauma patients using a propensity score model based on the mechanism of injury, the severity of the injury, the demographics, and several comorbidities.
A total of 554 COVID-negative individuals were matched with 185 asymptomatic COVID-positive patients. For each population group, the researchers examined the mortality rate, complications, and hospital resource consumption.
They discovered:
Positive, asymptomatic COVID trauma patients had the following characteristics compared to similar trauma patients who tested negative for COVID:
- Increased incidence of cardiac arrest and myocardial infarction (3.2% vs. 0.9%)*
- Additional days spent on a ventilator (3.33 vs 1.49 days)
- More time spent in the intensive care unit (4.92 vs 3.41 days)
- Longer duration of stay overall (11.41 vs 7.24 days)
- More expensive hospital costs ($176,505 vs. $107,591)
They came to the conclusion that patients who tested positive for COVID did much worse than comparable individuals who did not have the virus, even though they had no symptoms.
Marco Sozzi, MD, the study’s lead author and research fellow, said, “This is the one of the first studies to look at the impact of COVID in trauma patients with no clinical or radiological signs of infection, and we demonstrated higher incidence of cardiac events, longer length of stay and increased costs in positive trauma patients compared with a matched population of similar negative patients.”
“Simply put, you don’t have to have symptoms for the virus to potentially affect your body. Further studies will need to look at further indicators that may put patients at risk,” he added.
Even though we don’t know much about how the virus affects its host, Dr. Lam said that the study shows that the virus may have effects on the health of COVID patients who don’t have any symptoms. According to Dr. Sozzi, the study highlights the importance of screening all trauma patients for COVID so that positive individuals can be separated in order to stop the virus from infecting other patients.
Dr. Lam plans to investigate and track trauma patients who test positive for COVID at LAC+USC Medical Center.
“At the minimum, I have a heightened awareness about those patients that tested positive for cardiac events,” she added.
The authors also want to do prospectively designed studies to find out why there is a link between positive, asymptomatic COVID patients and problems other than myocardial infarction and cardiac arrest, which were the only problems their study found. Additionally, they will aim to identify the injuries that place these patients at a higher risk of complications.
“We need more studies to understand the reason for this relationship between COVID-positive patients and the higher incidence of cardiac and other complications after a trauma,” Dr. Sozzi added.
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