‘Cough analysis could soon reveal Covid severity in patients’

New Delhi: A cough analysis could soon reveal disease severity in COVID-19 patients, researchers said.

Differences in cough sounds depending on the severity of the respiratory condition were observed, the research team led by the Institute for Bioengineering of Catalonia (IBEC), Barcelona, Spain, said.

The results indicated that analysing coughs could help categorise Covid patients as mild, moderate, or severe and also monitor those with persistent infection, they said in their study published in the European Respiratory Journal Open Research.

Cough sounds of 70 patients with SARS-CoV-2 infection were recorded on the smartphone in the first 24 hours following hospital admission. Previously, studies have analysed cough acoustics for diagnosing respiratory diseases, while this study “specifically investigates the connection between the acoustic characteristics of coughs and the varying levels of pneumonia severity in COVID-19 patients,” said Raimon Jane, a senior co-author and the principal investigator at IBEC.

Five frequency-based parameters of cough sounds differed significantly with varying levels of disease severity and pneumonia progression, the researchers found by analysing data collected between April 2020 and May 2021 at Hospital del Mar in Barcelona.