MATERIALS AND METHOD
Approval for the study was received from the Medical Specialty Education
Board (decision no: 711/2021). We included 350 adult patients aged
18–65 years who’s COVID-19 infection had been confirmed by RT-PCR
positivity between August 2020 and January 2021 in our hospital’s
COVID-19 outpatient clinic and COVID-19 service. The patients’ admission
symptoms, clinical features, laboratory parameters, lung radiological
imaging and treatment regimens were retrospectively obtained from the
hospital information system. Patients (n = 79) who did not have a thorax
CT examination and were asymptomatic or had symptoms for less than 5
days were excluded from the study. According to the thorax CT images,
the patients were divided into two groups, those who developed and those
who did not develop pneumonia, and their clinical features, treatment
protocols and laboratory parameters; that is, D-dimer, troponin,
C-reactive protein (CRP), albumin, ferritin, lymphocyte count and
percentage, neutrophil count and percentage, neutrophil-to-lymphocyte
ratio (NLR), aspartate aminotransferase (AST), alanine aminotransferase
(ALT), and lactate dehydrogenase (LDH), were recorded retrospectively.
The patients’ informed consent was obtained.