Demographic, clinical and laboratory characteristics of pregnant women hospitalized with COVID-19 in the intensive care unit of Babol Ayatollah Rouhani Hospital

The COVID-19 disease is linked with several maternal and infant complications. Here, we conducted a study to examine the characteristics and outcomes of pregnant women who were admitted to the intensive care unit (ICU) due to COVID-19 complications.

We performed a retrospective cohort study of symptomatic pregnant women with COVID-19 who were hospitalized at Ayatollah Rouhani Hospital, in Babol, northern Iran, from March 2019 to September 2021. We used a checklist to collect data from patient records, including maternal characteristics (age, body mass, gestational age, parity, blood type, residence, education, and comorbidities), disease symptoms, and laboratory criteria at admission and then compared these variables between pregnant women who required intensive care unit (ICU) admission and those who did not. We used SPSS 20 for data analysis and considered P<0.05 as significant.

We included 215 symptomatic PCR-positive pregnant women with COVID-19 who were hospitalized. The mean age of the women was 30.63±6.09 years and the mean gestational age was 27.77±9.96 weeks. The mean hospital stay was 5.38±5.20 days, and 21 (9.8%) women were admitted to the ICU for a mean of 6.28 ± 5.84 days. The levels of LDH and D-Dimer were significantly higher in the ICU group than in the non-ICU group (P-value<0.000 and P-value=0.024, respectively). The ICU group also had a higher rate of cesarean section (P-value<0.000). There were no significant differences between the groups in terms of clinical symptoms, demographic characteristics, Moreover, none of the women hospitalized with COVID-19 had renal, hepatic, or cardiac disease. None of the infants tested positive for COVID-19 by PCR.

Our findings suggest that pregnant women with COVID-19 are not at increased risk of disease progression or ICU admission. Furthermore, we propose that monitoring the levels of D-Dimer and LDH in pregnant women with COVID-19 could be useful for predicting the severity of the disease and the need for ICU care, which may have implications for maternal and fetal outcomes.