ECMO Can Be Used as `Salvage Therapy` for COVID-19 Patients with Acute Respiratory Distress Syndrome, Finds New Study

A large study has suggested survival benefit for severely ill COVID-19 patients treated with extracorporeal membrane oxygenation (ECMO).

The findings of the study by researchers at University of California, Irvine Medical Center (UCIMC; Orange County, CA, USA) support the use of ECMO as "salvage therapy" for COVID-19 patients with acute respiratory distress syndrome (ARDS) or respiratory failure who do not improve with conventional mechanical ventilatory support. For critically ill COVID-19 patients treated with ECMO, the risk of death remains high - but is much lower than suggested by initial studies, according to the new research.


ECMO is a life-sustaining therapy for carefully selected patients with respiratory or circulatory failure. Requiring specialized equipment and highly trained professionals, ECMO is mainly provided at large medical centers. While some hospitals have been using ECMO therapy for COVID-19 patients with severe ARDS, there is a "paucity of data" on outcomes, according to the authors. Initial case series reported "exceedingly high" mortality rates: over 90%.

For their study, the researchers analyzed the outcomes of 11,182 patients with COVID-19 and ARDS who received ECMO between April and September 2020. The patients were treated at 155 US medical centers; numbers of patients treated with ECMO ranged from 1 to 38 per hospital. The majority of patients were under the age of 50 years (57.9%) with about 37% aged 51 to 64 years. Only about 5% were aged 65 years or older. For these ECMO-treated COVID-19 patients with ARDS, the overall rate of in-hospital death was 45.9%. Although high, that is roughly half the mortality rate reported in smaller ECMO studies from early in the pandemic. It's also comparable to the 39% death rate in a recent analysis of about 1,000 patients from the Extracorporeal Life Support Organization registry (largely treated at higher-volume ECMO centers).

For patients in the new study, average length of hospital stay was lengthy: 37 days, including 29 days in the intensive care unit. The in-hospital mortality rate increased with age: from about 25% for patients aged up to 30 years, to 42% for those aged 31 to 50 years, 53% for those aged 51 to 64, and 74% for those aged 65 or older. The researchers performed a subset analysis comparing patients aged 18 to 64 who were treated with (1,113 patients) or without ECMO (16,343 patients). In-hospital mortality was 44.6% for the ECMO-treated patients compared to 37.9% for those treated without ECMO.

"Our findings refute previous reports of futility for ECMO therapy in the setting of COVID-19," said Fabio Sagebin, MD, of the UCIMC Division of Cardiothoracic Surgery. "Our data showed that patients with COVID-19 and ARDS treated with conventional ventilatory support had a high risk of death and patients selected for ECMO, which is a higher risk group, had a similarly high rate of death. The data suggests that in appropriately selected patients, we can save lives with this therapy."

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