Cardiovascular and renal physiological impacts seen in blood tests of flu diagnosed patients
Authors: Martin Brigitte , Showmaker Kurt 
Published: May 2024

Early detection of influenza virus infection can potentially reduce risk of morbidity, mortality, and virus transmission through earlier intervention strategies. Although seasonal influenza is a localized respiratory viral infection, changes in cardiovascular physiology and inflammatory biomarkers have been previously observed by our group in mice during influenza infection. Distinguishing patterns among common blood panels, including complete blood count, basic metabolic, comprehensive metabolic, coagulation panel, and c-reactive protein, could lead to earlier diagnosis and better prognosis of symptomatic carriers, but also be useful to diagnose asymptomatic carriers of the virus and provide better infectious disease surveillance. The objective of this study was to utilize the University of Mississippi Medical’s extensive clinical database (EPIC) to investigate the potential association between common blood tests with patients diagnosed with influenza from January 1, 2017 to December 31, 2022. Diagnosed patients were identified from over 1 million patients (of a total population of 3 million) and 36 million encounters of Mississippi residents from the electronic health record Data from patients with reported demographic dimensions (age, first race, and sex), offce visit dimensions (BMI, diastolic blood pressure (BP), pulse rate, respiration rate, systolic BP, and temperature), and common blood test values were obtained for 1896 influenza diagnosed patients, including day of diagnosis and additional encounter visits within 60 days before and after first unique influenza diagnosis. Overall, at day of influenza diagnosis, we see an increase in red blood cell (RBC) count, white blood cell (WBC) count, hemoglobin, hematocrit, estimated glomerular filtration rate (eGFR), aspartate aminotransferase (AST), prothrombin time (PT), and c-reactive protein (CRP) and a decrease in platelets, calcium, glucose, sodium, potassium, bicarbonate, chloride, blood urea nitrogen (BUN), creatinine, albumin, and alkaline phosphatase (AST). Yet, at the sex-specific level, there were differences; females have an increase in glucose, BUN, and creatinine, while males have an increase in albumin and ALP. Multivariate analyses of patients with complete data for 18 blood tests and binned by month relative to the day of diagnosis confirm distinct differences on the day of diagnosis. Future analysis will reveal which blood tests contribute to overall change on the day of diagnosis. Our findings show both changes in cardiovascular and renal physiology during influenza infection and the need to assess these blood measurements during influenza virus infection studies in mice. NIH/NIGMS — 1P20GM144041-01A1 5334 Host-pathogen molecular and cardiovascular interaction during influenza infection. This is the full abstract presented at the American Physiology Summit 2024 meeting and is only available in HTML format. There are no additional versions or additional content available for this abstract. Physiology was not involved in the peer review process.