• Aliihsan Gemici, Hülya Bilgen, Cem Erdoğan, Abdullah Kansu, Oktay Olmuşçelik, Hüseyin Saffet Beköz, Rumeysa Çakmak, Ali Mert, and Ömür Gökmen Sevindik.
• Department of Hematology, School of Medicine, İstanbul Medipol University, İstanbul, Turkey
• Turk J Med Sci. 2020 Dec 17; 50 (8): 1781-1785.

Background/AimA SARS-Cov2 infection which was first arised from Wuhan in December 2019 and named as COVID-19. Still there lacks either a specific treatment or a vaccine to treat COVID-19. Convalescent plasma (CP) was previously used successfully to treat SARS-CoV-1 and MERS infections. Health authority in Turkey has published a guideline to integrate this promising option in the treatment process of patients who are prone to high risk of developing severe COVID 19.Materials And MethodsForty consecutive patients who had received CP at our center were included in the study. Demographics, COVID-19 specific parameters, biomarkers to detect the severity of COVID-19 infection and outcome variables were collected retrospectively. The correlation between outcome variables and the independent predictors of the outcome were reported.ResultsMedian age of the patients was 57.5 and 72.5% were male. At least one COVID-19 PCR test was confirmed to be positive in 75% of patients. Remaining 25% had a Chest-CT which was reported to be compatible with an ongoing COVID-19. All patients (100%) were classified as having severe COVID-19 infection. Over a half of the patients harbored an oxygen saturation of less than 90 despite of a continuous 5 L/min support of O2. 82.5% of the patients had a need for mechanical ventilation and 45.5% had a need for invasive mechanical ventilation. Nine out of 10 patients who have received CP outside ICU have totally recovered from COVID-19 at a median of 9 days, and a half of the patients who needed invasive mechanical ventilation were successfully free of mechanical ventilation support and managed to recover from COVID-19.ConclusionAccording to the results of this study, CP is an efficient conjunct to conventional therapy against COVID-19 with a favorable safety profile.This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

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