Level and relation of D-dimer with COVID-19 patients disease outcome: A study from Khyber Pakhtunkhwa

Abstract

Background: The activation of the plasmin enzyme produces the D-dimer, andelevated levels signal a hypercoagulable state and secondary fibrinolysis in the body,which is extremely valuable for thrombotic illness diagnosis. COVID-19 patients havebeen reported to be hypercoagulable. Methodology: A total of 250 COVID-19 patients from two hospitals in KhyberPakhtunkhwa were included in this study. The study participants were chosenrandomly regardless of their age and gender. For analysis, all data was extracted frompatient record files and entered into SPSS version 20. Results: The present study included 250 confirmed COVID-19 patients. Age of studycases were from 16 to 87 years with mean age of 43.6 ± 14.145. All the study caseswere confirmed as COVID-19 cases by real-time reverse transcription-polymerasechain reaction (PCR). Majority of the study cases 153 (61.2%) were male andmaximum numbers were from age group of 36 to 45 years. This study reveals lowerplasma D-dimer level in 184 (73.6%) of the selected patients, whereas high D-dimerlevel was found in 66 (26.4%) of the study cases, which was declared as significantbiomarker for final outcome of COVID-19 disease with a p-value is 0.00001 which issignificant value. Conclusion: D-dimer levels are frequently higher in SARS-CoV-2-infected individuals.The optimum threshold accepted value of D-dimer as a predictor of death in COVID-19patients is 1.5 μg/ml, which has good sensitivity and specificity. Significantly greaterD-dimer value is found among individuals with severe illness and may be consideredas a predictive marker for mortality among hospitalized patients. Thus, D-dimer maybe a rapid and low-cost laboratory indicator for COVID-19 diagnosis. Key words: SARS-CoV-2; D-dimer; COVID-19; Biomarker; Peshawar