Are men who smoke at higher risk for a more severe case of COVID-19 than women who smoke? A Systematic Review

  1. Aoife Rodgers
  2. Emilie Kruke Indreberg
  3. Lenah Alfallaj
  4. Manasi Nadkarni
  5. Zubair Kabir

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Abstract

Background

The novelty of the Covid-19 pandemic is reflected in the lack of literature available for the impact of smoking on the intensity of the COVID-19 clinical manifestations. Our study tries to address this gap.

Method

Six cohorts from China were analysed and a crude odds ratio was manually calculated.

Results

Patients with a smoking history were approximately 2 times (95% CI= 1.036-1.883) as likely to suffer from severe clinical manifestations of COVID-19 compared to patients without a smoking history. A higher percentage of males suffer more severe symptoms of COVID-19 in comparison to females, but this could be associated with the gender specific smoking trends observed in China.

Conclusion

The gender specific smoking trends could be associated with the increased severity of COVID-19 disease manifestations in the male population.

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  1. ScreenIT

    SciScore for 10.1101/2020.06.18.20135111: (What is this?)

    Please note, not all rigor criteria are appropriate for all manuscripts.

    Table 1: Rigor

    NIH rigor criteria are not applicable to paper type.

    Table 2: Resources

    Software and Algorithms
    SentencesResources
    Search strategy and Selection criteria: A search was conducted in the PubMed database for studies published between January 1, 2020, to April 27, 2020.
    PubMed
    suggested: (PubMed, RRID:SCR_004846)

    Results from OddPub: We did not detect open data. We also did not detect open code. Researchers are encouraged to share open data when possible (see Nature blog).

    Results from LimitationRecognizer: An explicit section about the limitations of the techniques employed in this study was not found. We encourage authors to address study limitations.

    Results from TrialIdentifier: No clinical trial numbers were referenced.

    Results from Barzooka: We did not find any issues relating to the usage of bar graphs.

    Results from JetFighter: We did not find any issues relating to colormaps.

    Results from rtransparent:
    • Thank you for including a conflict of interest statement. Authors are encouraged to include this statement when submitting to a journal.
    • Thank you for including a funding statement. Authors are encouraged to include this statement when submitting to a journal.
    • No protocol registration statement was detected.

    About SciScore

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  2. Version published to 10.1101/2020.06.18.20135111v1 on medRxiv