Journal of Contemporary Medicine (Jul 2021)
Can Hypoxia-Inducible Factor 1α be used as a biomarker to evaluate disease severity and prognosis in COVID-19 patients?
Abstract
This study was aimed to answer the questions of whether the serum levels of Hypoxia-Inducible Factor 1α (HIF-1α), which is increased by up to 100 times in many tissues including pulmonary tissue in cases of acute lung injury, could be used as a parameter for monitoring the severity and prognosis in COVID-19 patients. Fourty patients, who were admitted to the hospital with COVID-19 clinical symptoms, and 20 healthy control subjects were included in the study. The diagnosis of 20 patients within the patient group were confirmed by the PCR test. The remaining 20 patients were regarded as COVID-19 suspect group. Clinical and laboratory data of patients on admission were recorded. Clinical laboratory tests and serum HIF-1α levels were measured from the blood samples of COVID-19 group on the day of admission and one week after hospitalization. COVID-19 group was divided into four subgroups according to disease severity and HIF-1α values of each group were compared.In this study, serum HIF-1α values of confirmed COVID-19 patient group were measured higher than healthy control group’s serum HIF-1α values, however no significant difference was found for the COVID-19 suspect group. Within confirmed COVID-19 group, serum HIF-1α values on admission were higher than values after hospitalization, whereas Monocyte count, Platelet count and Ferritin values were lower. Among the confirmed COVID-19 cases, critically ill subgroup’s serum HIF-1α levels of the first week were significantly lower than mild subgroup’s serum HIF-1α levels of both the first week and the day of admission. HIF-1α values of COVID-19 group were strongly negative correlated with age, whereas weakly positive correlated with platelet counts. HIF-1α, which are thought to prevent alveolar damage, increased in COVID-19 patients. Additionally, low levels of HIF-1α in COVID-19 patients might be considered as a factor responsible for the aggravation of the clinical severity.
