AKI in COVID19: Hemodynamic Monitoring simply must be good practice

COVID19 patients suffer what was at first a largely unpredicted increase in Acute Kidney Injury. That’s perhaps old news by now. But scientists are still trying to more fully understand what’s going on. 

As early as April 2020 a paper in Critical Care observed that 25% of patients suffering COVID19-derived Acute Respiratory Distress Syndrome (ARDS) were also suffering Acute Kidney Injury. That figure, or something very close to it, was anecdotally and clinically replicated around the world. COVID19 was quickly tagged a disease that was as much about perfusion as it was about respiration, although of course it’s both, because they’re related. As the paper states, AKI in COVID19 patients could be “ascribed to different causes such as impairment of gas exchange, hemodynamic alterations including right heart failure, fluid overload and systemic congestion, injurious mechanic ventilation strategies, and development of secondary infections/sepsis. 

The word hemodynamic pops out for Deltex Medical’s team of experts. After all, years of experience and evidence support the idea that keeping your patient in their hemodynamic sweet spot is demonstrably the best way of ensuring optimal perfusion of the vital organs. While we don’t know for sure that hemodynamic imbalance in COVID19 patients is the sole or even main cause of the high incidence of AKI, what we do know is that outcomes always improve when the hemodynamics are closely managed. Deltex’s TrueVue with Esophageal Doppler monitoring provides cardiac output data direct from the aorta in real time. Three minutes to insert and orientate a probe has to be time well spent as clinicians continue to strive for optimal patient outcomes.

Join Deltex Medical in our campaign to minimize AKI through routine hemodynamic monitoring.