A new study that used machine learning algorithms on medical data from intensive care patients has found evidence that the main driver in COVID-19 deaths is not cytokine storms, as previously thought.
The team from Northwestern University looked at the medical records of 585 patients in the intensive care unit (ICU) at Northwestern Memorial Hospital who had severe pneumonia, 190 of whom had COVID-19. They applied machine learning to the data, to look at possible factors associated with mortality.
“The term ‘cytokine storm’ means an overwhelming inflammation that drives organ failure in your lungs, your kidneys, your brain and other organs,” senior author of the paper Dr. Benjamin Singer said in a statement. “If that were true, if cytokine storm were underlying the long length of stay we see in patients with COVID-19, we would expect to see frequent transitions to states that are characterized by multi-organ failure. That’s not what we saw.”
The study was published in the Journal of Clinical Investigation.
