Introduction
The world is currently facing the pandemic of severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2). The total number of cases of coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) is rising daily and no vaccine has yet been approved. While the pathophysiology behind the virus is still being studied, many possible several risk factors using small sample sizes have been found.
Material and methods
We conducted a pooled analysis using several databases such as Medline, Scopus, Wangfang, Web of Science, Research Square, medrxiv, and Google Scholar to identify studies reporting severe and non-severe groups of COVID-19 patients. The odds ratios as well as the 95% confidence intervals for hypertension, diabetes, and cerebrovascular disease leading to severe COVID-19 were calculated using R-software.
Results
Fifty-three articles were used for our analysis and they involved 30,935 confirmed cases of COVID-19 from several countries across the world. The odds ratio for severe COVID-19 in hypertensive patients, diabetics, and patients with a history of cerebrovascular disease was 2.58 (95% confidence interval (CI): 2.16–3.08, from 53 studies), 2.17 (95% CI: 1.72–2.74, from 44 studies), and 2.63 (95% CI: 1.80–3.85, from 25 studies), respectively.
Conclusions
Our analysis confirms that patients with hypertension, diabetes, or cerebrovascular disease are at a higher risk of a severe outcome of COVID-19. It is thus vital for physicians to identify the main risk factors for a severe outcome of this disease.
It has been more than a year since the new virus called severe acute respiratory syndrome Coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) was identified in Wuhan, China. The disease it causes was named Coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19), and on 11 March 2020 it was declared a pandemic. As the virus continues to spread, the number of patients worldwide has already crossed the 100 million mark with more than 2 million deaths. We sought to provide an update on the progress made in identifying the virus, its pathophysiology, risk factors such as hypertension, diabetes, and smoking, as well as various methods of treatment. Our review also provided an overview of the different vaccines.
Coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) is a highly infectious disease. By March 10, 2020, COVID-19 was in over 109 countries having infected over 113,702 people. [1] As the number of deaths keeps rising and with no vaccine, many countries are experiencing one of the most challenging times in their history. We conducted a meta-analysis to understand the role of headache as a clinical presentation with the severity of COVID-19. Articles published in English and Chinese were searched on PubMed. Each result was carefully screened, and only articles comparing the severity of COVID-19 used for our study. We used R-software (https://www.r-project. org/) to conduct the meta-analysis and design a forest plot. After a thorough evaluation, seven articles [2-8] were retained. Totally 1,495 patients presented as non-severe COVID-19 and 192 had headaches (Figure 1). Meanwhile, 94 of the 650 severe COVID-19 cases had a headache. The odds ratio (OR) was calculated as 1.32 (95% confidence interval [CI] 0.98-1.80). We conclude that the clinical presentation of headache in a COVID-19 patient cannot be used as a prognostic factor for severe COVID-19 disease. However, further analysis is recommended in the future with a larger sample size.
The ongoing pandemic of coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) keeps infecting and causing more deaths daily [1, 2]. As of March 29th, 2021, the world had registered 127,674,594 confirmed cases with 2,793,319 deaths, amongst which 562,292 occurred in the United States alone [3]. Since the virus is contagious and spreads easily, many countries started issuing lockdown orders at the start of the pandemic [4]. People of all age groups experienced drastic changes in their daily lives. The economic well-being of several countries, especially those relying on travels and tourism, global social and political relationships, pedagogical, and educational systems have all been heavily influenced [1, 4, 5].
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.