Nephrology experts from China, Italy and the United States share COVID-19 treatment experience at a live broadcast on April 18, 2020. [Photo provided to chinadaily.com.cn]

Some front line medical experts treating COVID-19 patients at home and abroad reached a consensus that blood purification therapy plays an important role in treating severe cases and can significantly increase their survival rate.

Based on clinical practice and data, they also believed that an early intervention of the therapy will benefit more COVID-19 patients staying in intensive care units, the nephrology experts from China, Italy and the United States said during a live broadcast shared within the domestic and foreign medical circles on April 18.

Xue Jun, a chief physician from the department of nephropathy at Huashan Hospital Affiliate with Fudan University in Shanghai, said the front line Chinese medical experience of COVID-19 case treatment found that blood purification helped significantly in helping patients with multiple organ failures and cytokine storm.

Among the more than 60 patients treated at the intensive care units at the Guanggu branch of Tongji Hospital in Wuhan, the hardest-hit region during the epidemic in China, by a medical team dispatched from Huashan Hospital, 55 percent of them suffered from acute kidney injury, Xue said.

They found through their actual experience that if blood purification was performed for patients suffering from the injury at the first stage, the patients’ survival rate could reach 60 percent. But if it was only performed when the injury progressed into the second or the third stage, their survival rates dropped to 20 percent or even 10 percent, according to Xue.

"And therefore we put forward an early intervention of blood purification for patients in severe and critical conditions and the therapy was included in the national treatment guideline regarding COVID-19 from the sixth edition released on Feb 19," he said during the online live broadcast held by Medtronic, a United States-based multinational company with various medical technology offerings, including renal care solution.

Xu Gang, director of nephrology at Tongji Hospital Affiliated with Tongji Medical College of Huazhong University of Science and Technology in Wuhan, Hubei province, said their clinical data showed that more than one-third of COVID-19 patients suffered from proteinuria and more than one-fourth suffered from hematuria, both are signs of kidney injury.

"Our hands-on experience showed that blood purification therapy could decrease the mortality rate of critically ill COVID-19 patients by more than 20 percent," he said, adding that they had also summed up experience in when to resort to the therapy and to whom.

Claudio Ronco, director of the department of nephrology and the International Renal Research Institute of San Bortolo Hospital in Vicenza, north Italy, said they observed clinically that some patients may suffer from cytokine storm and high inflammation condition and develop into a situation of multiple organ dysfunction, and found that such patients can benefit from blood purification.

"The therapy helps to limit the immune dysregulation of such ICU patients and thus be able to reduce very much organ dysfunction and their mortality rate," said Ronco, who is also a professor of nephrology at the University of Padova in Italy.

Such therapies also showed the importance of interdisciplinary treatment for severe COVID-19 patients, he added.

Around one-third patients suffering from acute kidney injury will develop into chronic kidney diseases, said Xue, and what will happen to the COVID-19 cases once with acute kidney injury is observed from follow-up study.