A new Tulane University School of Medicine study finds hospitalized COVID-19 patients who have a combination of obesity, high blood pressure, and diabetes were more than three times likely to die from coronavirus than COVID-19 patients without a metabolic syndrome.
The Tulane study, led by Dr. Joshua Denson, was published in the journal Diabetes Care.
The study defines a metabolic syndrome as a combination of at least three of the five conditions – hypertension, high blood sugar, obesity, high triglycerides and low HDL cholesterol.
Patients who had three of those conditions, and were hospitalized with COVID-19 were at an increased risk of dying from the disease according to the study.
Researchers followed the outcomes of 287 hospitalized COVID-19 patients at Tulane Medical Center and at University Medical Center New Orleans from Mach 30 to April 5. This was during the peak of the pandemic in New Orleans.
“Together, obesity, diabetes and pre-diabetes, high blood pressure and abnormal cholesterol levels are all predictive of higher incidents of death in these patients. The more of these diagnoses that you have, the worse the outcomes,” said lead author Dr. Joshua Denson, assistant professor of medicine and pulmonary and critical care medicine physician at Tulane University School of Medicine. “The underlying inflammation that is seen with metabolic syndrome may be the driver that is leading to these more severe cases.”
More than 85 percent of the patients in the study were non-Hispanic Black and almost 57 percent of the patients were women. The average age was 61-years-old according to the study. The most common conditions were hypertension (80%), obesity (65%), diabetes (54%) and low HDL (39%).
“It doesn’t matter if you’re young or old — we took that into account,” he said. “You really should be extra careful. I would say it should impact both preventing your exposures and, if you end up getting sick, you should probably see your doctor sooner.”
