Review: Cancer history is an independent risk factor for mortality in hospitalized COVID-19 patients

Review: Cancer history is an independent risk factor for mortality in hospitalized COVID-19 patients

This retrospective study evaluated the risk of cancer history for the mortality of patients with COVID-19.

The authors examined data from 3232 patients with pathogen-confirmed COVID-19 who were hospitalized between January 18th and March 27th, 2020, at Tongji Hospital in Wuhan, China. They used propensity score matching to minimize selection bias.

They analyzed 2665 hospitalized COVID-19 patients with complete clinical outcome data. Main findings included:

  • Age, sex, and cancer history were independent risk factors for mortality in multivariate analyses
  • Patients with cancer exhibited a significant increase in mortality rate (29.4% vs. 10.2%, P < 0.0001)
  • Clinical outcomes of patients with hematological malignancies had mortality rates twice that of patients with solid tumors (50% vs. 26.1%)
  • Cancer patients with complications had a significantly higher risk of poor outcomes
  • After propensity score matching, cancer patients still had a higher risk of mortality than the matched noncancer patients (odds ratio (OR) 2.98, 95% confidence interval (95% CI) 1.76–5.06)
  • Elevations in ferritin, high-sensitivity C-reactive protein, erythrocyte sedimentation rate, procalcitonin, prothrombin time, interleukin-2 (IL-2) receptor, and interleukin-6 (IL-6) were observed in cancer patients

In summary, this study found that cancer history was the only independent risk factor for COVID-19 among common comorbidities. Moreover, several laboratory parameters were significantly different between cancer patients and matched noncancer patients, which may indicate specific immune and inflammatory reactions in COVID-19 patients with cancer.

|2020-06-30T11:40:22-04:00June 29th, 2020|COVID-19 Literature|Comments Off on Review: Cancer history is an independent risk factor for mortality in hospitalized COVID-19 patients

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