Incidence of symptomatic Covid-19 infections in patients with mastocytosis and chronic myeloid leukemia: A comparison with the general Austrian population

Abstract

Background: The SARS-COV-2 (Covid-19) pandemic has impacted the management of patients with hematologic disorders. In some entities, an increased risk for Covid-19 infections was reported, whereas others including chronic myeloid leukemia (CML) had a lower mortality. We have analyzed the prevalence of Covid-19 infections in patients with mastocytosis during the Covid-19 pandemic in comparison to data from CML patients and the general Austrian population.

Materials and methods: The prevalence of infections and PCR-proven Covid-19 infections was analyzed in 92 patients with mastocytosis. As controls, we used 113 patients with CML and the expected prevalence of Covid-19 in the general Austrian population.

Results: In 25% of the patients with mastocytosis (23/92) signs and symptoms of infection, including fever (n = 11), dry cough (n = 10), sore throat (n = 12), pneumonia (n = 1), and dyspnea (n = 3) were recorded. Two (8.7%) of these symptomatic patients had a PCR-proven Covid-19 infection. Thus, the prevalence of Covid-19 infections in mastocytosis was 2.2%. The number of comorbidities, subtype of mastocytosis, regular exercise, smoking habits, age, or duration of disease at the time of interview did not differ significantly between patients with and without Covid-19 infections. In the CML cohort, 23.9% (27/113) of patients reported signs and symptoms of infection (fever, n = 8; dry cough, n = 17; sore throat, n = 11; dyspnea, n = 5). Six (22.2%) of the symptomatic patients had a PCR-proven Covid-19 infection. The prevalence of Covid-19 in all CML patients was 5.3%. The observed number of Covid-19 infections neither in mastocytosis nor in CML patients differed significantly from the expected number of Covid-19 infections in the Austrian population.

Conclusions: Our data show no significant difference in the prevalence of Covid-19 infections among patients with mastocytosis, CML, and the general Austrian population and thus, in mastocytosis, the risk of a Covid-19 infection was not increased compared to the general population.

Keywords: Covid-19; chronic myeloid leukemia; mastocytosis.

FIGURE 1

Percentage of mastocytosis patients with different mastocytosis variants (A) and types of directed therapy in our cohort of CML patients (B). (A) shows the relative number of patients of our study cohort in the different diagnostic subgroup of mastocytosis. (B) shows the relative number of patients in each treatment group of CML patients. ASM, aggressive SM; CM, cutaneous mastocytosis; HSCT, hematopoietic stem cell transplantation; ISM, indolent systemic mastocytosis; MIS, mastocytosis in the skin (The term MIS in this figure is used for in adult patients diagnosed with a skin involvement of mastocytosis in whom no bone marrow investigation was performed. Thus, systemic disease was not proven or ruled out); SM‐AHN, SM with associated hematologic neoplasm; SSM, smoldering SM

FIGURE 2

Distribution of patients with and without Covid‐19 infection in the different age groups of patients with mastocytosis. In this figure, the number of patients with or without Covid‐19 infections per age group as included in our study is shown. Both patients with PCR‐proven Covid‐19 infection were aged >50 years

FIGURE 3

Distribution of patients with and without Covid‐19 infection in patients with CML. The number of patients with or without Covid‐19 infection per age group as included in our study is shown in A. Patients with Covid‐19 infections were found to be younger at the time of interview (B) and had a shorter duration of disease (C). These differences were found to be significant as assessed by Mann–Whitney U test. The dots represent single patients; the bar in the middle, the median; and the whiskers, the interquartile range