One of the first studies to investigate the outcome of COVID-19 infection in patients with haematological cancers has found that while they have worse outcomes than the background population, the majority survive.
UK researchers identified 35 adult patients with a known diagnosis of a haematological malignancy who developed a laboratory-confirmed COVID-19 infection between 11 March 2020 and 11 May 2020 and followed them up for a minimum of 14 days.
At the end of the observation period, 60 per cent (n=21) of the patients had recovered from COVID-19 infection.
Age was the most significantly associated factor with COVID-19 infection outcome, with all but one of the patients who died being aged 70 years or older.
The number of co-existing co-morbidities such as hypertension, chronic kidney disease or diabetes was also predictive of outcome, with patients who died having significantly more concurrent diagnoses than patients who recovered.
No correlation between active treatment and outcome in the studied patients was seen - 15 patients who recovered from COVID-19 were on treatment at the time of diagnosis of their infection, including highly immunosuppressive regimens such as R-CHOP for lymphoma, induction regimens for acute leukaemia and triplet combinations for myeloma.
Lead author of the study Dr John Riches from Barts Cancer Institue, Queen Mary Unviersity of London said: “Although this is a small and preliminary study, it is a first step in understanding the risk posed by COVID-19 to patients with blood cancers. At the current time, all patients with certain blood cancers are being advised to ‘shield’ to try to minimise the risk of getting the virus. However, this study suggests that the risk of COVID-19 to younger patients with few or no medical conditions aside from their blood cancer is less than the risk to older patients with lots of other medical conditions.”
The study was published in the British Journal of Haematology.
Aries JA, Davies JK, Auer RL, Hallam SL, Montoto S, Smith M, Sevillano B, Foggo V, Wrench B, Zegocki K, Agrawal S, Le Dieu R, Truelove E, Erblich T, Araf S, Okosun J, Oakervee H, Cavenagh JD, Gribben JG, Riches JC. Clinical Outcome of Coronavirus Disease 2019 in Haemato-oncology Patients. Br J Haematol. 2020 May 18 [Epub ahead of print]. doi: 10.1111/bjh.16852. PMID: 32420609. View full text.
This article originally appeared on Univadis, part of the Medscape Professional Network.
