Introduction
As a global health crisis, COVID-19 pandemic has been the most serious challenge to deliver timely care to patients with other conditions1. Intracerebral hemorrhage (ICH), as a neurological emergency, is one of the most devastating diseases worldwide and would require emergency medical care in specialized neurological intensive care unit (NICU)2. However, it is difficult to balance between ICH treatment and COVID prevention during COVID-19 pandemic.
Moreover, hypertension management may be a problem. An unproven notion before that ACE-1 inhibitors and ARBs might increase the risk of COVID-19 infection theoretically since increased ACE-2 activity led to practical medicine restriction. Recently there have been reports that discontinuation of ACEI/ARB in COVID-19 patients is not related to severity of COVID-193, 4. However, discontinuation of ACEI/ARB once was not an uncommon phenomenon. Besides during COVID-19 pandemic the public may also suffered from social pressure, anxiety, depressed economy, lack of public health resources and so on.
Herein, we compared the differences of ICH manifestations, major interventions and outcomes between before and during COVID-19 pandemic at 31 centers in China, from the CHEERY study: Chinese cerebral hemorrhage: mechanism and intervention study.
Methods Study design The underlying data for this analysis was collected prospectively of two groups of patients with ICH before (1/12/2018-30/11/2019) and during COVID-19 (1/12/2019-30/11/2020) pandemic at 31 centers in China. We followed the Strengthening the Reporting of Observational Studies in Epidemiology reporting guideline.