Coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) is characterized by a high heterogeneity of clinical presentation and outcomes. This is also true for patients undergoing maintenance hemodialysis (HD), who, due to specific clinical factors and immune status, represent a distinct subgroup of COVID-19 patients.

Starting from this observation in this research letter we tested and validated in two cohorts of HD patients with COVID-19 (derivation and validation cohort, respectively) an innovative model which combines linear mixed effect modeling and cluster analysis on longitudinal.

This study aimed to describe a methodology allowing patient stratification from simple and widely available data.

Our results could be interesting not only to improve COVID-19 management but also to support the application of longitudinal cluster analysis strategy in other clinical settings.

The authors have declared no competing interest.

This study did not receive any funding

I confirm all relevant ethical guidelines have been followed, and any necessary IRB and/or ethics committee approvals have been obtained.

Yes

The details of the IRB/oversight body that provided approval or exemption for the research described are given below:

The study was performed according to the Declaration of Helsinki and was approved by the local Ethics Committee (N. Registro CER Liguria: 135/2020). All participants provided written informed consent before enrollment.

I confirm that all necessary patient/participant consent has been obtained and the appropriate institutional forms have been archived, and that any patient/participant/sample identifiers included were not known to anyone (e.g., hospital staff, patients or participants themselves) outside the research group so cannot be used to identify individuals.

Yes

I understand that all clinical trials and any other prospective interventional studies must be registered with an ICMJE-approved registry, such as ClinicalTrials.gov. I confirm that any such study reported in the manuscript has been registered and the trial registration ID is provided (note: if posting a prospective study registered retrospectively, please provide a statement in the trial ID field explaining why the study was not registered in advance).

Yes

I have followed all appropriate research reporting guidelines and uploaded the relevant EQUATOR Network research reporting checklist(s) and other pertinent material as supplementary files, if applicable.

Yes

The data underlying this article are available in Harvard Dataverse, at https://doi.org/10.7910/DVN/KDKR4V, (accessed on 16 July 2022).

https://doi.org/10.7910/DVN/KDKR4V