COVID-19 in the Swedish ICU-cohort: Risk Factors of Critical Care Admission and Intensive Care Mortality

The COVID-19 pandemic is currently involving all parts of the world. Several risk factors for
critical illness and death from the disease have been proposed. However, the observed
associations between different comorbidities and chronic medications have not fully been
related to the frequencies of the same comorbidities and chronic medications in age- and
sex-matched controls from the general population. This is important since some of the
proposed risk factors are very common in the aged who, by age alone, are more prone to a more
severe course of the disease.

By combining several registries, we will compare, on several comorbidities such as
hypertension and diabetes and several medications such as immunosuppressant drugs and
ACE-inhibitors, the first 2000 cases of COVID-19 patients receiving critical care in Sweden
to a set 8000 age- and sex-matched controls.

Data sources:

Registries of the Swedish board of Health and wellfare:

1. The patient registry containing information including diagnostic codes from all
specialized Healthcare contacts in Sweden. Reporting i governed by law.

2. The Swedish Prescribed Drug Register to which all dispensations from pharmacies of
prescribed drugs are reported.

Statistics Sweden is the agency responsible for the official population statistics of Sweden.
They will draw our controls from the Registry of the total population.

The Swedish Intensive Care Registry (SIR) contains all intensive care episodes in Sweden.
They have information on Intensive Care (ICU) admission, diagnoses, interventions and
outcomes.

The study design is combined prospective ond retrospective. The data is prospectively
collected to the registries but the study protocol is retrospectively designed.