prevalence of malignancy and chronic obstructive pulmonary disease among patients with covid-19: a systematic review and meta-analysis

Background and aim: prevalence malignancy and copd in the patients infected by covid-19 has been considered to be of high importance for the health-care laborers. therefore, the present systematic review and meta-analysis aimed to determine the malignancy prevalence and the chronic obstructive pulmonary disease amongst covid-19 patients. materials and methods: some electronic databases, pubmed, cochrane library, embase, and isi have been used to perform systematic literature in may 2020. then, a software program (endnote x8) has been utilized for managing the electronic titles. two reviewers blind and independently extracted data from abstracts and full-text studies. moreover, the prevalence of malignancies and copd with 95% ci has been estimated via the inverse variance method and fix effect model of meta-analysis. also, heterogeneity has been assessed with i2 and chi-square. consequently, forest plots and funnel plot have been evaluated with the use of a software program (i.e., comprehensive meta-analysis stata v16). results: a total of 167 potentially relevant titles and abstracts have been found during the electronic and manual search. finally, ten studies have been included. prevalence of malignancy equalled 1.56%, effect size has been (es 2.04 95% ci -61.03, 65.11. p= 0.95) among the six studies and the total number of patients has been 1595 (915 men, 680 female) with the age range of 20-68 years. no statistically significant difference has been found between studies (p=1.00). conclusion: it has been found that malignancy and chronic obstructive pulmonary disease are the most pervasive underlying diseases in patients with covid-19.