Search

With great interest, we have read the recent article entitled ‘Prevalence and clinical outcomes of COVID-19 in patients with autoimmune diseases: a systematic review and meta-analysis’, which is published online in Annals of the Rheumatic Diseases .1 In this paper, Akiyama et al performed a meta-analysis to investigate the prevalence and clinical outcomes of coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) in patients with autoimmune diseases.1 The authors observed that there was no significant difference in death between COVID-19 patients with autoimmune diseases and those without (odds ratio (OR)=0.545, 95% confidence interval (CI): 0.081 to 3.682).1 It is an extremely interesting study. But, their findings were based on only five published studies. Up to now, a considerable number of studies on this topic are emerging. Therefore, the association between autoimmune diseases and COVID-19 mortality is needed to be clarified on the basis of updated data by a quantitative meta-analysis. We performed this meta-analysis following the Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Reviews and Meta-analyses guidelines.2 A comprehensive literature search was performed in electronic databases including PubMed, Web of Science and EMBASE to identify eligible studies from 1 January 2020 to 23 December 2020 using the following keywords: ‘coronavirus disease 2019’ or ‘COVID-19’ or ‘severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus-2’ or ‘SARS-CoV-2’ and ‘autoimmune diseases’ or ‘rheumatic diseases’ or ‘inflammatory bowel disease’ or ‘psoriasis’ or ‘systemic lupus erythematosus’ and ‘mortality’ or ‘death’ or ‘fatality’ or ‘non-survivor’ or ‘deceased’. The reference lists of relevant literatures were also reviewed to identify missing studies. We included articles …