Objective In the past few months, WHO declared coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) caused by SARS-CoV-2 as a major pandemic, with increasing number of discovered cases and mortalities in all countries. Up till now, there are a lot of controversial data on its pathogenesis, possible complications, prognostic factors, and available preventive and/or therapeutic options. A series of fast growing research studies are being conducted aiming at studying prognostic criteria that may predict the disease severity and possible outcomes and hence plan of management either home or hospital management. Patients and methods Our cohort study included 73 COVID-19-confirmed positive cases by nasopharyngeal swab/reverse transcriptase PCR to evaluate correlation between serum ferritin levels (baseline and follow-up samples at day 7), as well as C-reactive protein levels and severity of clinical presentation of COVID-19-infected patients. Results Our results have demonstrated a statistically significant difference between mild (n=40) and moderate cases (n=33) regarding baseline ferritin level (P=0.00);however;no significant difference was detected among ferritin changes during the course of the disease (P=0.744), and also, no statistically significant difference in ferritin changes was found among mild and moderate severity groups (P=0.942). Finally, the only significant predictors of clinical severity were baseline ferritin and C-reactive protein levels according to multivariate analysis model (P=0.014 and =0.000, respectively). Conclusions The current study added further evidence to suggest baseline serum ferritin as an index of severity in COVID-19 and could have a prognostic effect;however, we cannot rely on follow-up serum ferritin during treatment and the course of the disease to predict outcome of the disease, and it may be misleading.
Baseline and follow-up serum ferritin level as a prognostic factor in coronavirus disease 2019-infected patients: A single-center experience