Analysis of cancer patients affected by covid-19- A systemic review and meta analysis

Abstract

Introduction: Corona virus disease 2019 (COVID-19) is an infectious disease caused by severe acute respiratory syndrome corona virus 2 and was first identified in Wuhan, Hubei province, the People’s Republic of China in December 2019. Since then, it has rapidly spread worldwide, with more than 27.3 million cases reported as of September 8, 2020. The clinical characteristics of the illness are highly variable ranging from asymptomatic disease to mild, self-limiting cases to severe disease requiring intensive care unit (ICU) admission and mechanical ventilation. Materials and Methods: This systematic review was performed according to the Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Reviews and Meta-Analyses (PRISMA) recommendations. Institutional review board approval was not required for this study since no patient identifiers were disclosed. A systematic electronic search was performed in PubMed/MEDLINE, Embase, Cochrane Central, Google Scholar, and MedRxiv databases to identify studies reporting outcomes on cancer patients with COVID-19 from December 1, 2019 to May 23, 2020. Results: The literature search resulted in 4,854 articles, of which 92 articles underwent full review and 31 were included in the final analysis. Among the studies included for systematic review, 26 were retrospective studies and 5 are ongoing clinical trials on cancer patients with no reported outcomes at the time of conducting this meta-analysis. The data from 26 studies were included in the meta-analysis; 17 studies had multiple cancer types and 9 studies pertained to a single cancer type. Ten studies were performed in China, 6 in the United States, 3 in the United Kingdom, 3 in Italy, and 2 each in Spain and France. Conclusion: Cancer patients with COVID-19 disease are at increased risk of mortality and morbidity. A more nuanced understanding of the interaction between cancer-directed therapies and COVID-19-directed therapies is needed. This will require uniform prospective recording of data, possibly in multi-institutional registry databases.