Prothrombotic factors associated with COVID-19 complications: A systematic review preprint.

Abstract

BACKGROUND: The COVID-19 pandemic caused deaths and severe clinical complications associated with thrombosis and hypercoagulability, motivating this literature review. OBJECTIVE: To analyze the scope of scientific publications that demonstrate an association of thromboembolism with complications of COVID-19. METHOD: A systematic literature review was performed to identify clinical complications associated with thrombosis in people exposed to SARS-CoV-2 infection. The articles were selected from MEDLINE database after being screened and filtered to extract the methodologies used and the evidence of clinical complications by compromised organs or systems and pathology description. The evidence was extracted in Cohort Studies for statistical analysis and hypothesis testing (t-test). RESULTS: A total of 208 studies were selected. Observational Studies were predominant, corresponding to 64% of the total, and other methodologies corresponded to 9% in the inclusion. Review articles were excluded and corresponded to the remaining 27% of the selected articles. Subsequently, 150 articles were screened, and 121 were filtered. Among these, 11 Cohort Studies were extracted as the sample, which were eligible for analysis and subsequent Hypothesis Test. This test showed a Mean Difference of 4.74 [Ha (μ=8.08 Exposure) > (μ=3.33 No exposure)], with a p-value of 0.096 for a 95% confidence interval. Despite the numerical value of the difference in the means due to the influence of variance, the test result was not statistically significant due to the small number of the sample of Cohort studies. CONCLUSION: It was observed that prothrombotic conditions were present and translated by hypercoagulability in the evaluated articles. Individuals exposed to SARS-CoV-2 infection have been shown to experience complications caused by thrombosis more often than the unexposed. It is suggested to conduct a Meta-analysis with a larger sample of Cohort Studies to further analyze this association.