breast cancer survivors and covid-19: prevalence and risk of severe disease in a screening study

Determining the risk of severe course coronavirus disease 2019 (covid-19) and its related factors in survivors of common cancers such as breast cancer is important. this study has been designed to evaluate the prevalence of covid-19 infection in breast cancer survivors and also estimate the risk of severe disease in this population. out of 6134 patients in the shiraz breast cancer registry (sbcr), a total of 292 patients who elapsed less than a year from their breast cancer diagnosis were excluded. we called 5842 patients. finally, 4135 breast cancer survivors who agreed to cooperate were screened for covid-19 symptoms by a symptom-based questionnaire in november 2020. covid-19 in symptomatic participants was confirmed by a polymerase chain reaction (pcr) test. the clinical and paraclinical data of the covid-19 course were collected for patients with a positive pcr test. a total of 247 (5.9%) participants had at least reported one of the covid-19 symptoms. also, 17% of symptomatic participants had a positive pcr test؛ 83.7% had mild disease, 9.5% moderate, and 16.7% had severe conditions. chronic cardiovascular disease, hypertension, and diabetes were related to an increased risk of severe illness (p = 0.018, p = 0.018, p = 0.002). this study suggests that breast cancer intermediate and longtime survivors without other underlying diseases are considered at low risk for developing severe/critical covid-19.