Prevalence and impact of pulmonary vascular complications of Covid-19

This project forms part of the larger national consortium study (the Post-Hospitalisation COVID-19 study, PHOSP-COVID), led by Professor Chris Brightling at the University of Leicester, co-funded by the MRC and NIHR, to set up a cohort of up to 10,000 patients who have been hospitalised with Covid-19 and who will be tracked to understand all of the possible longer-term health outcomes from the infection. It is led by investigators from Imperial College and the Universities of Cambridge and Sheffield. Hospitalised patients often have evidence of acute blood vessel damage in the lungs and this study will define the risk of longer-term pulmonary vascular complications, leading to guidelines for referral of patients to the UK network of seven Specialist Pulmonary Hypertension centres. The frequency of vascular complications in the lung at least 3 months after admission to hospital will be assessed using imaging and measuring blood oxygen levels in 1000 patients in the PHOSP-COVID cohort. Those with evidence of complications will be followed up in the specialist centres with a series of more intensive tests and measurement of biomarkers ('omics) to understand the features of the lung damage in more detail. Machine learning will be used to identify whether these cluster in groups suggesting different mechanisms of damage, and how different they may be from the features of pulmonary artery hypertension previously investigated in similar detail in patients before the pandemic. The results will lead directly to targeted clinical trials of medicines that are expected to help specific groups of patients with evidence of lung blood vessel damage as a consequence of Covid-19 infection.