DNA test can quickly identify pneumonia in patients with severe COVID-19, aiding faster treatment

Researchers have developed a DNA test to quickly identify secondary infections in COVID-19 patients, who have double the risk of developing pneumonia while on ventilation than non-COVID-19 patients.

  Lt. Cmdr. Michael Heimes checks on a patient connected to a ventilator at Baton Rouge General Mid City campus  Credit: Official U.S. Navy Page

For patients with the most severe forms of COVID-19, mechanical ventilation is often the only way to keep them alive, as doctors use anti-inflammatory therapies to treat their inflamed lungs. However, these patients are susceptible to further infections from bacteria and fungi that they may acquire while in hospital – so called ‘ventilator-associated pneumonia’.

Now, a team of scientists and doctors at the University of Cambridge and Cambridge University Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust, led by Professor Gordon Dougan, Dr Vilas Navapurkar and Dr Andrew Conway Morris, have developed a simple DNA test to quickly identify these infections and target antibiotic treatment as needed.

The test, developed at Addenbrooke’s hospital in collaboration with Public Health England, gives doctors the information they need to start treatment within hours rather than days, fine-tuning treatment as required and reducing the inappropriate use of antibiotics. This approach, based on higher throughput DNA testing, is being rolled out at Cambridge University Hospitals and offers a route towards better treatments for infection more generally. The results are reported in the journal Critical Care.

Patients who need mechanical ventilation are at significant risk of developing secondary pneumonia while they are in intensive care. These infections are often caused by antibiotic-resistant bacteria, and are hard to diagnose and need targeted treatment.

“Early on in the pandemic we noticed that COVID-19 patients appeared to be particularly at risk of developing secondary pneumonia, and started using a rapid diagnostic test that we had developed for just such a situation,” said co-author Dr Andrew Conway Morris from Cambridge’s Department of Medicine and an intensive care consultant. “Using this test, we found that patients with COVID-19 were twice as likely to develop secondary pneumonia as other patients in the same intensive care unit.”

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Image: Lt. Cmdr. Michael Heimes checks on a patient connected to a ventilator at Baton Rouge General Mid City campus

Credit: Official U.S. Navy Page

Reproduced courtesy of the University of Cambridge



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