Level and relation of D-dimer with COVID-19 patients disease outcome: A study from Khyber Pakhtunkhwa.

Background: The activation of the plasmin enzyme produces the D-dimer, and elevated levels signal a hypercoagulable state and secondary fibrinolysis in the body, which is extremely valuable for thrombotic illness diagnosis. COVID-19 patients have been reported to be hypercoagulable. Methodology: A total of 250 COVID-19 patients from two hospitals in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa were included in this study. The study participants were chosen randomly regardless of their age and gender. For analysis, all data was extracted from patient record files and entered into SPSS version 20. Results: The present study included 250 confirmed COVID-19 patients. Age of study cases were from 16 to 87 years with mean age of 43.6 ± 14.145. All the study cases were confirmed as COVID-19 cases by real-time reverse transcription-polymerase chain reaction (PCR). Majority of the study cases 153 (61.2%) were male and maximum numbers were from age group of 36 to 45 years. This study reveals lower plasma D-dimer level in 184 (73.6%) of the selected patients, whereas high D-dimer level was found in 66 (26.4%) of the study cases, which was declared as significant biomarker for final outcome of COVID-19 disease with a p-value is 0.00001 which is significant value. Conclusion: D-dimer levels are frequently higher in SARS-CoV-2-infected individuals. The optimum threshold accepted value of D-dimer as a predictor of death in COVID-19 patients is 1.5 µg/ml, which has good sensitivity and specificity. Significantly greater D-dimer value is found among individuals with severe illness and may be considered as a predictive marker for mortality among hospitalized patients. Thus, D-dimer may be a rapid and low-cost laboratory indicator for COVID-19 diagnosis. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]