Abstract Rationale This study aims to analyze data from patients who developed anemia during the COVID-19 pandemic and assess the risk of developing different types of anemia among patients diagnosed with COVID-19. Methods This retrospective cohort study used the National Inpatient Sample (2020-2021). We included males and females of various ethnicities (White, Black, Hispanic, Asian/Pacific Islander, Native American, and others) with ICD-10 codes D50-D64. The data was weighted with hospital strata. Data analysis was performed using IBM SPSS Statistics™ 25.0, applying inferential statistics. Results This study encompassed a cohort of 136,636,051 with a mean age of 49.93 years (+/- 27.26), of whom 75,904,558 (55.6%) were females. Mortality rate was 2.4% (3,316,244) with a mean length of stay of 4.77 days (± 26.322). Of all patients, 24.9% (16,382,561) had anemia, whereas 75.1% (49,306,986) did not. Compared with 2018, when 8,257,430 patients (23.2%) had anemia, the figure rose during the COVID-19 pandemic in 2021 to 8,398,512 (25.2%), a significant increase (p 0.001). Further analysis showed that this increase is not associated with the COVID-19 pandemic, as COVID-19 patients were 13% less likely to have anemia RR = 0.874 95% CI 0.872-0.876. Further analysis by subgrouping anemia types reveals that COVID-19 patients were less likely to develop most types of anemia except for other aplastic anemias and bone marrow failure syndromes RR = 1.209 95% CI 1.201-1.217 and other anemias RR = 1.095 95% CI 1.092-1.099 which is ambiguous diagnosis. Conclusions While anemia rates rose during the pandemic, COVID-19 was not a major driver except for specific anemia subtypes. Further research is needed to understand these associations. This abstract is funded by: None
Martinez-Nachon et al. (Fri,) studied this question.