Research Paper|Volume 13, Issue 1|pp 16—26

Comparison of clinical characteristics among younger and elderly deceased patients with COVID-19: a retrospective study

Xueyun Tan¹, Shuai Zhang¹, Juanjuan Xu¹, Mei Zhou¹, Qi Huang¹, Limin Duan¹, Zhilei Lv¹, Hui Xia¹, Wenjing Xiao¹, Zhengrong Yin¹, Yang Jin¹

¹Department of Respiratory and Critical Care Medicine, Union Hospital, Tongji Medical College, Huazhong University of Science and Technology, Wuhan, China

* Equal contribution

Received: May 30, 2020Accepted: October 9, 2020Published: December 11, 2020

https://doi.org/10.18632/aging.202139

Copyright: © 2020 Tan et al. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY 3.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.

Abstract

We aimed to compare the age-related clinical characteristics between younger and elderly deceased COVID-19 patients. This single-center retrospective study included 163 adult deceased COVID-19 patients who were admitted to Wuhan Union Hospital West Campus from January 12, 2020, to March 30, 2020. Demographic and clinical features were collected by reviewing the medical records. The median age of the 163 deceased patients was 69 (interquartile range [IQR], 62-78) years. They were classified as younger (age 18-69 years; 86/163, 52.8%) and elderly (≥70 years; 77/163, 47.2%) subjects. Younger deceased patients were more likely to develop fever (72/86 vs 54/77, P=0.039) than elderly deceased patients were while anorexia was (29/77 vs 19/86, P=0.029) more common in elderly deceased patients than in younger deceased patients. In multivariate analyses, age was a protective factor for acute cardiac injury of deceased COVID-19 patients (odds ratio [OR] 0.968, [95% confidence interval (CI), 0.940-0.997]; P=0.033) while chronic cardiac disease was a risk factor for acute cardiac injury of deceased COVID-19 patients (OR 2.660 [95%CI, 1.034-6.843]; P=0.042). Our study described the clinical characteristics of younger and elderly deceased COVID-19 patients and demonstrated that younger deceased patients were more likely to develop an acute cardiac injury.