Outcomes in inflammatory arthropathy patients hospitalized for COVID-19

Collins, T.; Patel, V.; Babajanians, A.; Kubomoto, S.

Background: Covid 19 is a new and rapidly spreading corona virus which has reached pandemic proportions. As of 5/22/20 there are 5.08 million confirmed cases and 332,000 deaths worldwide. Primary manifestations are respiratory, with a subset developing severe hypoxic respiratory failure. Several risk factors predispose patients to worse outcomes including age, obesity, hypertension, chronic kidney disease, COPD, asthma, CHF, and diabetes. This is a retrospective cohort analysis of patients with Rheumatoid arthritis, Ankylosing spondylitis, or Psoriatic arthritis who were hospitalized for COVID-19 infection across 165 HCA hospitals from 1/1/2020 to 5/30/2020. We compared endpoints and calculated odds of ICU admission, invasive ventilation, mortality compared to control as well as length of stay and discharge location. Objectives: Our objectives include measuring the outcome of Patients in two arms, the first being those with Rheumatoid arthritis, Ankylosing spondylitis, and Psoriatic arthritis who are infected with COVID 19 to an age matched and comorbidity matched arm (using the Charlson comorbidity index) for the composite endpoint of ICU admission, invasive ventilation, and death. We believe the inflammatory arthropathy arm will have a worse composite endpoint then the control arm. we will also attempt to calculate a hazard ratio of this arm vs the control to the composite endpoint. We will also examine the length of stay as well as inflammatory markers mentioned in between the two arms. We suspect initial inflammatory markers will be lower in the inflammatory arthropathy arm, particularly CRP and LDH, due to chronic immune modulating medication and these markers will not correlate as closely with severe illness represented by the composite endpoint as in the control arm. Methods: We analyzed 86,217 patients admitted with COVID-19 comparing 751 patients who had inflammatory arthropathy to patients who did not. T tests were used for parametric outcome and chi square tests for non-parametric outcomes. Multivariate analysis included potential confounders such as age, and comorbidities such as diabetes, heart disease, etc. Results: The odds ratio for mortality in the arthropathy arm was 1.37 with a confidence interval of 1.09 to 1.71 with a p value of 0.006. The odds ratio for ventilation was 1.35 with CI of 1.09 to 1.67 and p value of 0.006. The odds ratio of ICU admission was 1.46 with CI of 1.24 to 1.72 and P value of 0.000. The average length of stay of the arthropathy arm was 8.51 days +/-10.02 vs 4.59 days +/-8.26 of the control, p < 0.001. The discharge disposition of the arthropathy arm vs control group is as follows, 13.32% died inpatient vs 5.87% in the control, 56.72% were discharged home vs 77.19%, 6.79% went to hospice care vs 3.10%, 4.79% remained inpatient at the end of the study interval vs 3.45%, 17.18% were discharged to rehab vs 8.43%, and other discharges not included in the above groupings were 1.2% vs 1.96%, p<0.001. 31.29% of the arthropathy group required ICU admission vs 16.32% and 13.98% required ventilation vs 6.9%, p <0.001. The average age was higher in the arthropathy arm vs control at 66.56 years old vs 51.53, p <0.001. Charlson comorbidity index was also higher in the arthropathy arm at 2.72 vs 0.96, p <0.001. Conclusion: This is a large analysis of inflammatory arthropathy patients hospitalized with COVID-19. While the arthropathy group was older, and had more co-morbidities, when adjusting for potential confounders, inflammatory arthropathy patients had a higher risk of death and mechanical ventilation, as well as longer length of stay.