Tuberculosis and COVID-19 (search done on 12 May 2020)
Citation: Gao Y, Liu M, Chen Y, et al. Association between tuberculosis and COVID‐19 severity and mortality: A rapid systematic review and meta‐analysis. Journal of Medical Virology. 2021;93(1):194-6.
What is this? Some COVID-19 patients have pre-existing tuberculosis.
In this rapid review, the authors searched for studies of the impact of tuberculosis on the risk of severe illness or death in COVID-19 patients. They restricted their searches to articles published in English and Chinese and did the search on 12 May 2020. They included 4 studies (2383 patients) on tuberculosis and COVID severity and 2 studies (382 patients) on tuberculosis and COVID mortality, all from China.
What was found: At the time of this review, the included studies showed that pre-existing tuberculosis is associated with an increased risk of severe COVID-19. Therefore, impaired lung function from tuberculosis may be a risk factor for disease progression, although pre-existing tuberculosis does not increase the risk of contracting COVID-19.
At the time of this review, existing research provided conflicting evidence on the association between tuberculosis and mortality from COVID-19.
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