Effect of complete blood count parameters on the clinical course of COVID-19 in pregnant women

Abstract

Objective: Coronovirus Disease-19 (COVID-19) pandemic, affected pregnant women as well as many people. Aim of this study is to compare complete blood count (CBC) parameters of pregnant women infected with COVID-19 to that of healthy pregnant women and determine their prognostic features. Materials and methods: 142 pregnant women infected with COVID-19 and 46 healthy pregnant women, included in this retrospective case-control study. Patients infected with COVID-19 were grouped as mild, moderate and severe, according to the findings of oxygen saturation and lung involvement. Age, gestational age, gravida, hospitalization length and CBC parameters of the participants were compared, according to the groups. Results: CBC test revealed that uninfected pregnant women had statistically lower level of white blood cell count (WBC, p=0.001), platelet count (p=0,024), neutrophil count (p=0,001), lymphocytes (p=0,005), monocytes (p=0,001) and platelecrit (p=0.007) than from infected pregnant women. Evaluation of pregnant women with COVID-19 grouped into 3 categories as mild, moderate and severe showed that age, gravida and hospitalization length were comparable between groups, WBC (p=0.012) and neutrophile (p=0.001) counts of mild group were significantly lower than moderate group and there was no significant difference between moderate and severe groups regarding WBC and neutrophile counts (respectively p=0,281, p=0.542). Conclusion: CBC analysis is simple, applicable, widely used and cheap laboratory method. CBC parameters seem as a candidate for predicting COVID-19 clinical course. However, larger sample sized prospective studies supporting this idea are required.

Keywords

• COVID-19
• pregnancy
• complete blood count
• disease severity

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