Although COVID infections have become milder and more manageable over time, the need to watch out for severe coronavirus illness remains crucial. Symptoms such as difficulty breathing, shortness of breath, low oxygen levels, chest pain, and persistent drowsiness were some of the prevalent symptoms associated with severe COVID-19 infections. Other techniques for assessing a patient's risk include radiography, ultrasound, or computed tomography (CT), which are more costly and complex. Therefore, simpler and more accessible tools are being developed to make detecting severe diseases more convenient.
A new study has introduced a new tool to assess the risk of suffering severe pneumonia.
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Study Details
The study, published in the European Respiratory Journal Open Research, looked at smartphone recordings of voluntary cough sounds from 70 COVID-19 patients within the first 24 hours of their hospital admission, between April 2020 and May 2021.
The patients were categorised into three groups according to the severity of their disease at the time of cough recording.
The mild group involved patients with no pneumonia, the moderate group were patients with pneumonia but did not require supplemental oxygen, and severe patients showed moderate or severe pneumonia that necessitated oxygen therapy with invasive or non-invasive respiratory support.
Some of the pre-existing respiratory conditions in some patients were asthma, chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, and interstitial pulmonary fibrosis.
The smartphone recordings were conducted in a room with as little background noise as possible. Patients were asked to take a deep breath and then cough voluntarily. They coughed 3–4 times in the direction of the smartphone, which was positioned 15–20 cm from their mouth.
The team of researchers from IBEC and Hospital del Mar, in collaboration from the Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya (UPC), CIBER-BBN and CIBERES, ran an acoustic analysis of these recordings, which revealed differences in the cough sounds based on the severity of the respiratory condition.
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What Did Research Find?
Of the 70 patients, recordings of 62 patients were included in the analysis, with mild, moderate, and severe groups consisting of 31, 14 and 17 patients respectively.
The study findings revealed: “5 of the parameters examined were found to be significantly different in the cough of patients at different disease levels of severity, with a further 2 parameters found to be affected differently by the disease severity in men and women.”
Raimon Jané, a professor at UPC and the principal investigator at IBEC and CIBER-BBN and the senior co-author of the study, said, "While acoustic cough analysis methods have been previously proposed for diagnosing respiratory diseases, we aimed to take a step further by specifically investigating the connection between the acoustic characteristics of coughs and the varying levels of pneumonia severity in COVID-19 patients."
Dr Joaquim Gea, emeritus head of the Pneumology Service, researcher at the Hospital del Mar Research Institute, and senior co-author of the study, shares that these findings can help “in regions with limited medical infrastructure or during emergency situations. This approach can aid in the prompt identification and isolation of COVID-19 patients, thus facilitating proper medical care and the implementation of control measures.”
