• Akash Kumar, Saphalta Baghmar, Prashant Mehta, Priya Tiwari, Lalit Kumar, Sameer Bakhshi, Amit Agarwal, Ishaan Gupta, Anjan Trikha, Sushma Bhatnagar, Ajay Gogia, Prabhat Singh Malik, Ranjit Kumar Sahoo, Sameer Rastogi, Raja Pramanik, Atul Batra, Deepam Pushpam, Chitresh K Sharma, Vinod Sharma, Babita Kataria, Kapil Goyal, Shreyas Samaga, Sneha J Bothra, and Atul Sharma.
• Department of Medical Oncology, National Cancer Institute, New Delhi, India.
• Indian J Med Res. 2022 May 1; 155 (5&6): 546553546-553.

Background & ObjectivesHigh mortality has been observed in the cancer population affected with COVID-19 during this pandemic. We undertook this study to determine the characteristics and outcomes of cancer patients with COVID-19 and assessed the factors predicting outcome.MethodsPatients of all age groups with a proven history of malignancy and a recent diagnosis of SARS-CoV-2 infection based on nasal/nasopharyngeal reverse transcriptase (RT)-PCR tests were included. Demographic, clinical and laboratory variables were compared between survivors and non-survivors groups, with respect to observed mortality.ResultsBetween May 11 and August 10, 2020, 134 patients were included from the three centres and observed mortality was 17.1 per cent. The median age was 53 yr (interquartile range 39-61 yr) and thirty four patients (25%) were asymptomatic. Solid tumours accounted for 69.1 per cent and breast cancer was the most common tumour type (20%). One hundred and five patients (70.5%) had received chemotherapy within the past four weeks and 25 patients (19.3%) had neutropenia at presentation. On multivariate analysis, age [odds ratio (OR) 7.99 (95% confidence interval [CI] 1.18-54.00); P=0.033], haemoglobin [OR 6.28 (95% CI 1.07-37.04); P=0.042] neutrophil-lymphocyte ratio [OR 12.02 (95% CI 2.08-69.51); P=0.005] and baseline serum albumin [OR 18.52 (95% CI 2.80-122.27); P=0.002], were associated with higher mortality. Recent chemotherapy, haematological tumours type and baseline neutropenia did not affect the outcome.Interpretation & ConclusionsHigher mortality in moderate and severe infections was associated with baseline organ dysfunction and elderly age. Significant proportion of patients were asymptomatic and might remain undetected.

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