Alkaline phosphatase

Coronavirus

Intensive care medicine

Intensive care unit

Biology

Sepsis

Aspartate transaminase

Biochemistry

Coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19)

Immunology

Lactate dehydrogenase

Biomarker

Bioinformatics

Creatine kinase

Procalcitonin

Enzyme

Infectious disease (medical specialty)

Internal medicine

Medicine

Immunohistochemistry

Disease

Enolase

Frontiers in Immunology

Severe acute respiratory syndrome-coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) causes a wide spectrum of clinical manifestations, with progression to multiorgan failure in the most severe cases. Several biomarkers can be altered in coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19), and they can be associated with diagnosis, prognosis, and outcomes. The most used biomarkers in COVID-19 include several proinflammatory cytokines, neuron-specific enolase (NSE), lactate dehydrogenase (LDH), aspartate transaminase (AST), neutrophil count, neutrophils-to-lymphocytes ratio, troponins, creatine kinase (MB), myoglobin, D-dimer, brain natriuretic peptide (BNP), and its N-terminal pro-hormone (NT-proBNP). Some of these biomarkers can be readily used to predict disease severity, hospitalization, intensive care unit (ICU) admission, and mortality, while others, such as metabolomic and proteomic analysis, have not yet translated to clinical practice. This narrative review aims to identify laboratory biomarkers that have shown significant diagnostic and prognostic value for risk stratification in COVID-19 and discuss the possible clinical application of novel analytic strategies, like metabolomics and proteomics. Future research should focus on identifying a limited but essential number of laboratory biomarkers to easily predict prognosis and outcome in severe COVID-19.

Laboratory Biomarkers for Diagnosis and Prognosis in COVID-19