Long COVID in cancer patients: preponderance of symptoms in majority of patients over long time period.
- The University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center, United States
Abstract
Background: An increasing number of observational studies have reported the persistence of symptoms following recovery from acute COVID-19 disease in non-cancer patients. The long-term consequences of COVID-19 are not fully understood particularly in the cancer patient population. The purpose of this study is to assess post-acute sequelae of SARS-CoV-2 infection (PASC) in cancer patients following acute COVID-19 recovery.
Methods: We identified cancer patients at MD Anderson Cancer Center who were diagnosed with COVID-19 disease between March 1, 2020 and Sept 1, 2020 and followed them till May 2021. To assess PASC, we collected patients reported outcomes through questionnaires that were sent to patients daily for 14 days after COVID-19 diagnosis then weekly for 3 months, and then monthly thereafter. We also reviewed patients' electronic medical records to capture the persistence or emergence of new COVID19-related symptoms reported during any clinic or hospital encounter beyond 30 days of the acute illness and up to 14 months.
Results: We included 312 cancer patients with a median age of 57 years (18-86). The majority of patients had solid tumors (75%). Of the 312 patients, 188 (60%) reported long COVID-19 symptoms with a median duration of 7 months and up to 14 months after COVID-19 diagnosis. The most common symptoms reported included fatigue (82%), sleep disturbances (78%), myalgias (67%) and gastrointestinal symptoms (61%), followed by headache, altered smell or taste, dyspnea (47%) and cough (46%). A higher number of females reported a persistence of symptoms compared to males (63% vs 37%; p=0.036). Cancer type, neutropenia, lymphocytopenia, and hospital admission during acute COVID-19 disease were comparable in both groups. Among the 188 patients with PASC, only 16 (8.5%) were readmitted for COVID-related reasons.
Conclusions: More than one out of two cancer patients, and more likely females, report PASC that may persist beyond 6 months and even one year. The most common symptoms are non-respiratory and consist of fatigue, sleep disturbance, myalgia and gastro-intestinal symptoms. Most of the cancer patients with PASC were managed on outpatient basis with only 8,5% requiring a COVID-19 related re-admission.
Funding: This research is supported by the National Institutes of Health/National Cancer Institute under award number P30CA016672, which supports the MD Anderson Cancer Center Clinical Trials Office. The funders had no role in study design, data collection and interpretation, or the decision to submit the work for publication.
Data availability
Data Availability Statement: The study protocol, statistical analysis plan, lists of deidentified individual data, generated tables and figures will be made available upon request by qualified scientific and medical researchers for legitimate research purposes. Requests should be sent to achaftari@mdanderson.org and yijiang@mdanderson.org. Data will be available on request for 6 months from the date of publication. Investigators are invited to submit study proposal requests detailing research questions and hypotheses in order to receive access to these data.
Article and author information
Author details
Anne-Marie Chaftari
Cielito Reyes-Gibby
Funding
National Institutes of Health (P30CA016672)
- Hiba Dagher
- Anne-Marie Chaftari
- Ishwaria M Subbiah
- Alexandre E Malek
- Ying Jiang
- Peter Lamie
- Bruno Granwehr
- Teny John
- Eduardo Yepez
- Jovan Borjan
- Cielito Reyes-Gibby
- Mary Flores
- Fareed Khawaja
- Mala Pande
- Noman Ali
- Raniv Rojo
- Daniel D Karp
- Ray Hachem
- Issam I Raad
The funders had no role in study design, data collection and interpretation, or the decision to submit the work for publication.
Reviewing Editor
- Jameel Iqbal, DaVita Labs, United States
Ethics
Human subjects: This study was approved by the institutional review board at MD Anderson. A waiver of informed consent was obtained since this study posed no risk to the patients given that no clinical or laboratory interventions were done.
Version history
- Received: June 17, 2022
- Preprint posted: July 15, 2022 (view preprint)
- Accepted: January 23, 2023
- Accepted Manuscript published: February 7, 2023 (version 1)
- Version of Record published: March 1, 2023 (version 2)
Copyright
© 2023, Dagher et al.
This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License permitting unrestricted use and redistribution provided that the original author and source are credited.
Metrics
-
- 3,110
- views
-
- 315
- downloads
-
- 14
- citations
Views, downloads and citations are aggregated across all versions of this paper published by eLife.
Download links
A two-part list of links to download the article, or parts of the article, in various formats.
Downloads (link to download the article as PDF)
Open citations (links to open the citations from this article in various online reference manager services)
Cite this article (links to download the citations from this article in formats compatible with various reference manager tools)
Long COVID in cancer patients: preponderance of symptoms in majority of patients over long time period.
eLife 12:e81182.
https://doi.org/10.7554/eLife.81182
Further reading
-
- Epidemiology and Global Health
- Medicine
- Microbiology and Infectious Disease
eLife has published the following articles on SARS-CoV-2 and COVID-19.
-
- Cancer Biology
The tumor microenvironment is a determinant of cancer progression and therapeutic efficacy, with nutrient availability playing an important role. Although it is established that the local abundance of specific nutrients defines the metabolic parameters for tumor growth, the factors guiding nutrient availability in tumor compared to normal tissue and blood remain poorly understood. To define these factors in renal cell carcinoma (RCC), we performed quantitative metabolomic and comprehensive lipidomic analyses of tumor interstitial fluid (TIF), adjacent normal kidney interstitial fluid (KIF), and plasma samples collected from patients. TIF nutrient composition closely resembles KIF, suggesting that tissue-specific factors unrelated to the presence of cancer exert a stronger influence on nutrient levels than tumor-driven alterations. Notably, select metabolite changes consistent with known features of RCC metabolism are found in RCC TIF, while glucose levels in TIF are not depleted to levels that are lower than those found in KIF. These findings inform tissue nutrient dynamics in RCC, highlighting a dominant role of non-cancer-driven tissue factors in shaping nutrient availability in these tumors.
