The relationship of COVID-19 severity with cardiovascular disease and its traditional risk factors: A systematic review and meta-analysis

Kunihiro Matsushita; Ning Ding; Minghao Kou; Xiao Hu; Mengkun Chen; Yumin Gao; Yasuyuki Honda; David Dowdy; Yejin Mok; Junichi Ishigami; Lawrence J Appel

is the (which was not peer-reviewed) The copyright holder for this preprint . https://doi.org/10.1101/2020.04.05.20054155 doi: medRxiv preprint Potential confounding by age and sex is relevant to prior CVD, hypertension, and diabetes, since these comorbidities become more prevalent with increased age. 3 Because most studies did not report adjusted risk estimates for these comorbidities, we ran meta-regression with random-effects for log odds ratio or log hazard ratio for these comorbidities by the difference in mean or median age between those with vs. without primary outcome across eligible studies. To obtain reliable estimates, we conducted meta-regression for any analyses with at least five studies. We also depicted funnel plots and visually checked the possibility of publication bias. Heterogeneity of study estimates was assessed by I 2 statistic, and I 2 >75% was considered high heterogeneity. 10 A p-value <0.05 was considered statistically significant. All analyses were conducted with STATA 14 or 15 (StataCorp, LLC, College Station, Texas, USA).