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Meta-Analysis
. 2021 Mar;52(1):73-79.
doi: 10.1007/s12029-020-00528-3. Epub 2020 Sep 30.

The Risk and Prevalence of COVID-19 Infection in Colorectal Cancer Patients: a Systematic Review and Meta-analysis

Mohammad Hossein Antikchi  1 , Hossein Neamatzadeh  2   3 , Yaser Ghelmani  4 , Jamal Jafari-Nedooshan  5 , Seyed Alireza Dastgheib  6 , Shadi Kargar  7 , Mahmood Noorishadkam  2 , Reza Bahrami  8 , Mohammad Hossein Jarahzadeh  9
Affiliations
Meta-Analysis

The Risk and Prevalence of COVID-19 Infection in Colorectal Cancer Patients: a Systematic Review and Meta-analysis

Mohammad Hossein Antikchi et al. J Gastrointest Cancer. 2021 Mar.

Abstract

Background: Patients with cancer might be at an increased risk of infection with COVID-19 and a more severe disease course. However, different tumor types have differing susceptibility to the infection and COVID-19 phenotypes. Thus, the risk and prevalence of COVID-19 is not uniform across the different tumor types. Here, we performed a meta-analysis to estimate the risk and prevalence of COVID-19 infection in colorectal cancer (CRC) patients.

Methods: A comprehensive literature search was performed up to July 25, 2020, thorough PubMed, Web of Science, Scopus, Google Scholar, CNKI, CBM, China Science, Wan Fang, and SciELO databases. The risk of COVID-19 infection in CRC patients was performed based on the odds ratios (ORs) and 95% confidence interval (95% CI).

Results: A total of six studies with 204 different cancer patients with COVID-19 and 92 CRC infected patients with COVID-19 were selected. Our results showed that the prevalence of COVID-19 infection in CRC patients was 45.1% in the global population. The pooled data showed that there is no a significant risk of infection with COVID-19 in CRC patients in the global population (OR = 0.261, 95% CI 0.099-0.533, p = 0.082). However, when subgroup analysis was performed based on country of origin, we found a significant correlation in Chinese CRC patients (OR = 0.221, 95% CI 0.146-0.319, p ≤ 0.001).

Conclusions: This study results revealed that Chinese CRC patients harbored a higher risk of COVID-19 infection. However, more multicenter, larger sample sizes and high-quality studies are required to verify this meta-analysis result.

Keywords: COVID-19; Colorectal cancer; Infection; Prevalence; Risk; SARS-CoV-2.

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Conflict of interest statement

The authors declare that they have no conflicts of interest.

Figures

Fig. 1
Fig. 1
Flowchart of literature search and selection process
Fig. 2
Fig. 2
Forest plot for risk of COVID-19 infection in CRC patients. a Global CRC patients. b Chinese CRC patients
Fig. 3
Fig. 3
The funnel plots of publication bias for the risk of COVID-19 infection in CRC patients using the random model in the global population, before (blue) and after (red) the “trim-and-fill” method
See this image and copyright information in PMC

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