Detectable serum SARS-CoV-2 viral load (RNAaemia) is closely correlated with drastically elevated interleukin 6 (IL-6) level in critically ill COVID-19 patients

By Xiaohua Chen, Binghong Zhao, Y. Qu, Yurou Chen, J. Xiong, Yong Feng, Dong Men, Qianchuan Huang, Y. Liu, Bo Yang and 2 more. medRxiv, 2020

765 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Background: Although the SARS-CoV-2 viral load detection of respiratory specimen has been widely used for novel coronavirus disease (COVID-19) diagnosis, it is undeniable that serum SARS-CoV-2 nucleic acid (RNAaemia) could be detected in a fraction of the COVID-19 patients. However, it is not clear that if the incidence of RNAaemia could be correlated with the occurrence of cytokine storm or with the specific class of patients. Methods: This study enrolled 48 patients with COVID-19 admitted to the General Hospital of Central Theater Command, PLA, a designated hospital in Wuhan, China. The patients were divided into three groups according to the Diagnosis and Treatment of New Coronavirus Pneumonia (version 6) published by the National Health Commission of China. The clinical and laboratory data were collected. The serum viral load detection and serum IL-6 levels were determined. Except for routine statistical analysis, Generalized Linear Models (GLMs) analysis was used to establish a patient status prediction model based on real-time RT-PCR Ct value. Findings: The Result showed that cases with RNAaemia were exclusively confirmed in critically ill patients group and appeared to reflect the illness severity. Further more, the inflammatory cytokine IL-6 levels were significantly elevated in critically ill patients, which is almost 10-folds higher than those in other patients. More importantly, the extremely high IL-6 level was closely correlated with the incidence of RNAaemia (R=0.902) and the vital signs of COVID-19 patients (R= -0.682). Interpretation: Serum SARS-CoV-2 viral load (RNAaemia) is strongly associated with cytokine storm and can be used to predict the poor prognosis of COVID-19 patients. Moreover, our results strongly suggest that cytokine IL-6 should be considered as a therapeutic target in critically ill patients with excessive inflammatory response.

Subfields: Infectious Diseases, Obstetrics and Gynecology

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/68e17b75936eb956336461eaacbe663bf2c3f711

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Citations in the corpus

SARS-CoV-2 infection: The role of cytokines in COVID-19 disease (2020, background): “found an inverse proportional association between elevated IL-6 levels and T cell counts [82], and another study of patients with severe symptoms described elevated serum levels of IL-6 and CRP [91].”
Surviving Sepsis Campaign: Guidelines on the Management of Critically Ill Adults with Coronavirus Disease 2019 (COVID-19) (2020, neutral): “In such cases, inhibition of IL-6 may help attenuate the cytokine release syndrome by reducing cytokine concentrations and acute phase reactant production (219).”
Should we stimulate or suppress immune responses in COVID-19? Cytokine and anti-cytokine interventions (2020, neutral): “Not only is IL-6 a major mediator within the cytokine storm, its levels have been closely correlated with ARDS severity and outcome, along with blood SARS-CoV-2 viral load [71,74,118].”