COVID-19 increases age- and sex-controlled 21-day fatality rates for patients with melanoma, hematologic malignancies, uterine cancer, or kidney cancer
Abstract
Introduction
Prior research has reported an increased risk of fatality for cancer patients, but most studies investigated the risk by comparing cancer patients to non-cancer patients among COVID-19 infections. Only a few studies have compared the impact of a COVID-19 infection to non-infection with matched cancer patients and types.
Methods & Materials
We conducted survival analyses of 4,606 cancer patients with COVID-19 test results from March 16 to October 11, 2020 in UK Biobank and estimated the overall hazard ratio of fatality with and without COVID-19 infection. We also examined the hazard ratios of thirteen specific cancer types with at least 100 patients.
Results
COVID-19 resulted in an overall hazard ratio of 7.76 (95% CI: [5.78, 10.40], p<10−10) by studying the survival rate of 4,606 cancer patients for 21-days after the tests. The hazard ratio was shown to vary among cancer type, with over a 10-fold increase in fatality rate (false discovery rate≤0.02) for melanoma, hematologic malignancies, uterine cancer, and kidney cancer using a stratified analysis on each of the cancer types. Although COVID-19 imposed a higher risk for localized cancers compared to distant metastasis ones, those of distant metastasis yielded higher fatality rates due to their multiplicative effects.
Conclusion
The results highlight the importance of timely care for localized and hematological cancer patients and the necessity to vaccinate uninfected patients as soon as possible, particularly for the cancer types influenced most by COVID-19.
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