Cancer Patients Over-Represented in Long COVID Group

(Reuters) – Cancer patients account for an outsized proportion of people who end up with persistent, troublesome symptoms after recovering from COVID-19, a condition known as long COVID, U.S. researchers reported at the annual meeting of the American Society of Clinical Oncology.

From a nationally representative sample of over 4.3 million people diagnosed with COVID-19 between January 2020 and February 2022, researchers identified 1,700 adults with long COVID and found that 37.3% were cancer patients. The most common cancers were skin (seen in 21.9% of the cancer patients), breast (17.7%), prostate (8.3%), lymphoma (8%) and leukemia (5.7%).

Among long COVID patients, those with cancer were older than non-cancer patients, more likely to have other medical conditions, and more likely to have been hospitalized for COVID-19. The researchers call for “further investigation to identify risk factors for long COVID in patients with cancer.”

SOURCE: https://bit.ly/3NvcTie ASCO 2022, June 4, 2022.

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