Patients with certain cancers are nearly three times as likely to die of COVID-19, study says

Those with blood or lung malignancies, or tumors that have spread throughout the body, were at highest risk of complications and death

A study released April 28 at the American Association for Cancer Research’s virtual annual meeting and published in the organization’s peer-reviewed journal, Cancer Discovery, found that cancer patients who developed COVID-19 had nearly a threefold higher death rate from the virus than the 2 to 3 percent rate estimated for the general population.

Read The Washington Post article about this (its coverage of the coronavirus pandemic is free).

Quoted is J. Leonard Lichtenfeld, MD, (pictured here), our deputy chief medical officer. Dr. Len says the study “reflects what we had heard previously — that cancer patients are more susceptible to the virus, and that the course of the infection is worse and the outcomes are worse.” He said that the study was still relatively small and that thousands more patients need to be scrutinized.

The apparent higher risk of death and other serious complications from the virus are among the dangers facing cancer patients as they try to navigate a pandemic that has forced the delays of some treatments, the closing of many clinical trials to new patients, and shortages of critical pain medications, said Howard Burris, chief medical officer and executive director of the Sarah Cannon Research Institute in Nashville and president of the American Society of Clinical Oncology (ASCO).

“We face daunting challenges to optimal patient care,” he said at an ASCO media briefing last week. He noted that some hospitals “have effectively deemed all cancer surgeries elective,” requiring them to be postponed. While such delays make sense for some patients with early-stage disease, they can be devastating for “patients with fast-moving or hard-to-treat cancers,” he warned.

Cancer patients are more vulnerable for several reasons, according to the paper’s authors and other experts. Cancer depresses the immune system, and cancer patients tend to be older, which is itself a risk factor for serious complications from COVID-19.

Another high-risk group — patients with lung cancer — are likely more vulnerable because of reduced lung function, the authors of the study said. In addition, some treatments, such as chemotherapy and surgery also suppress the immune system. The paper found that even cancer patients who had completed treatment had higher risks of serious COVID-19 complications than those who had never had cancer. But those with early-stage disease — localized malignancies — had results similar to those of non-cancer patients.

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