Fact Check: Does COVID-19 Affect The Kidney Also?

COVID-19 primarily affects the lungs, but the viral infection can damage other organs, too, increasing the risk of long-term health problems.

Lungs apart, it has been found that heart and brain are also at times affected by COVID-19. There have been a few reports of blood clots and blood vessel problems, too.

Can this deadly virus, which has wreaked havoc across the globe since March 2020, lead to kidney complications also?

Well, a recent study in Italy suggests acute kidney injury (AKI) is a severe complication of coronavirus disease.

Medical records of 307 COVID-positive patients, hospitalized at University Hospital of Modena, were studied by doctors.

According to the findings of the study, published in US National Library of Medicine on July 1, AKI was diagnosed in 69 out of those 307 patients, which amounts to a not-too-insignificant 22.4%.

Not all patients with AKI had it in a severe form, though. AKI was found to be extremely severe (stage 1) in 57.9% of affected patients, 24.6% had it in stage 2 and 17.3% in stage 3.

Another important observation is that most AKI patients were above 70 years old. They showed higher serum levels of main markers of inflammation and also a higher rate of pneumonia than non-AKI patients.

The risk of death for those who developed AKI was a high 56.5%.

Their kidney injury was associated with a higher rate of urinary abnormalities — proteinuria (leakage of protein in urine) and microscopic hematuria (blood in urine).