Title

Association between comorbid conditions and disease severity in COVID-19 patients: A retrospective study from a government medical college hospital of Central India

Authors

Rakesh Kumar Sisodia¹, Tarunendra Kumar Mishra^1,*, Mahesh Kumar Patidar² & Mahendra Chouhan¹ & Umesh Sinha³

Affiliation

¹Department of General Medicine, Government Medical College Ratlam, Madhya Pradesh, India; ²Department of Respiratory Medicine, Government Medical College Ratlam, Madhya Pradesh, India; ³Department of Community Medicine, Government Medical College Ratlam, Madhya Pradesh, India; *Corresponding author

Email

Rakesh Kumar Sisodia - E-mail: dr.r.k.sisodia17@gmail.com; Phone: +91 9993506558

Tarunendra Kumar Mishra - E-mail: mishratarunendra@yahoo.com; Phone: +91 9584715516

Mahesh Kumar Patidar - E-mail: dr.mahesh7patidar@gmail.com; Phone: +91 9977999416

Mahendra Chouhan - E-mail: drmahendrachouhan@gmail.com; Phone: +91 7997227411

Umesh Sinha - E-mail: umi_sinha@yahoo.com; Phone: +91 9826036279

Article Type

Research Article

Date

Received June 1, 2026; Revised June 30, 2026; Accepted June 30, 2026, Published June 30, 2026
 

Abstract

The COVID-19 pandemic has posed a major global health challenge, with emerging evidence showing worse outcomes among patients with pre-existing comorbidities. Therefore, it is of interest to examine the association between comorbidity status and disease severity among 384 laboratory-confirmed COVID-19 patients admitted to a government medical college in Central India. Patients were divided into comorbid (n=192) and non-comorbid (n=192) groups, with hypertension (69.27%), diabetes mellitus (36.98%) and cardiac disease (13.54%) being most prevalent. Fever (67.45%), cough (55.47%) and shortness of breath (36.20%) were predominant symptoms, while severe illness occurred in 29.69% of comorbid versus 11.46% of non-comorbid patients (χ²=24.83, p<0.00001). Thus, we show that hypertension and diabetes markedly increase COVID-19 severity, emphasizing prioritized care and aggressive management of high-risk populations.

Keywords

Coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19), comorbidities, disease severity, hypertension, diabetes mellitus, severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2)

Citation

Sisodia et al. Bioinformation 22(6): 3640-3646 (2026)

Edited by

Vini Mehta  

ISSN

0973-2063

Publisher

Biomedical Informatics

License

This is an Open Access article which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly credited. This is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License.