Prevalence and Impact of COVID-19 in Immuno-compromised Individuals: An Experience from a Private Outpatient Setting of South Punjab, Pakistan

Authors

  • Author- Qazi Masroor Ali, Ali Imran, Sadaf Shafique, Raheel Khan, Hafiz Muhammad Kaleem Ullah, Sajjad Sohail, Muhammad Sohail Tariq, Maria Masroor, Ghulam Muhy-u-din Chaudhary
     

    DOI: https://doi.org/10.70302/jpsim.v3i2.2222 

Abstract

To find out the prevalence and impact of COVID-19 on immunocompromised patients visiting outpatient department of a private healthcare facility of South Punjab, Pakistan.

Methods

This cross-sectional study was done at Outpatient Department of Aleena Hospital, Bahawalpur, Pakistan from 1st June 2020 to 30th December 2020. We included a total of 197 patients of both genders aged between 15 to 90 years visiting outpatient department of Aleena Hospital for various medical reasons. All patients underwent antibody testing for COVID-19 adopting immunochromatography for both IgG and IgM. A patient was labeled as immunocompromised if having diabetes mellitus or liver cirrhosis.

Results

 In a total of 197 patients, 122 (61.9%) were male. Overall, mean age was 45.1±13.3 years ranging 15 to 90 years. A total of 50 (25.4%) cases were antibody positive for COVID-19. BMI ≥ 25 (p=0.045), and “been to close proximity with someone who travelled outside/inside the country” (p=0.014) were noted to have significant association with COVID-19 positive cases while all other variables had insignificant association (p>0.05). Presence of diabetes mellitus was noted to have significant association with COVID-19 antibody positivity (p=0.002). Overall, no significant association of immunocompromised status and COVID-19 antibodies positivity was observed (p=0.090).

Conclusion

 Prevalence of positive COVID-19 antibodies was very high among patients visiting outpatient department of a private healthcare setting of South Punjab, Pakistan. Immunocompromised individuals were not found to have any significant association with COVID-19 infections.

Keywords:

COVID-19, diabetes mellitus, immunocompromised, polymerase chain reaction.

Published

2022/06/15

Issue

Vol. VOLUME 3-ISSUE 2

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non-Commercial 4.0 International License .

This is an open-access journal and all the published articles / items are distributed under the terms of the  Creative Commons Attribution BY-NC 4.0 License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited. For comments psimjournal@gmail.com