Urological cancer patients receiving treatment during COVID-19 : a single-centre perspective

Abstract

Background

Active cancer, immunosuppressive treatments and immunotherapies have been reported to increase cancer patients’ risk of developing severe COVID-19 infection. For patients and clinicians, treatment risk must be weighed against disease progression.

Methods

This retrospective case series surveys urological cancer patients who made informed decisions to continue anticancer treatment (ACT) at one centre from March to June 2020.

Results

Sixty-one patients (44 bladder, 10 prostate, 7 upper urinary tract cancers) received 195 cycles of ACT (99 chemotherapy, 59 immunotherapy, 37 as part of ongoing clinical trials), with a range of indications: 43 palliative, 10 neoadjuvant, 8 adjuvant. One patient tested positive for COVID-19 but experienced only mild symptoms. Fourteen patients interrupted treatment outside of their schedule, seven of these due to potential COVID-19 associated risk. ACT supportive steroids were not associated with higher rates of COVID-19.

Conclusions

This single-centre series reports that ACT administration did not result in an apparent excess in symptomatic COVID-19 infections.

Metadata

Item Type:	Article
Authors/Creators:	Williams, S.T. El Badri, S. Hussain, S.A. https://orcid.org/0000-0003-1552-511X
Copyright, Publisher and Additional Information:	© 2021 The Author(s). This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license, and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article’s Creative Commons license, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article’s Creative Commons license and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/.
Dates:	Published: 27 April 2021 Published (online): 8 February 2021 Accepted: 6 January 2021
Institution:	The University of Sheffield
Academic Units:	The University of Sheffield > Faculty of Medicine, Dentistry and Health (Sheffield) > Department of Oncology (Sheffield)
Depositing User:	Symplectic Sheffield
Date Deposited:	16 Mar 2021 08:38
Last Modified:	17 Feb 2022 12:09
Status:	Published
Publisher:	Springer Nature
Refereed:	Yes
Identification Number:	10.1038/s41416-021-01263-7
Related URLs:	PubMed URL Erratum/Corrigendum
Open Archives Initiative ID (OAI ID):	oai:eprints.whiterose.ac.uk:171802

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Urological cancer patients receiving treatment during COVID-19 : a single-centre perspective

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