Impact of Chronic Kidney Disease on Severity and Mortality in COVID-19 Patients: A Systematic Review and Meta-analysis

Coronavirus disease 19 (COVID-19) has affected over 180 countries, resulting in global mass death. It has been reported that patients with underlying disease are more likely to contract the disease and become critically ill. The impact of chronic kidney disease (CKD) on the severity of COVID-19 has been underlined in the literature. In this analysis, we have provided evidence of an association between CKD and COVID-19. We followed the PRISMA protocol and conducted a literature search using Google Scholar, EMBASE, PubMed, and Clinical trail.gov. The initial search yielded 2102 articles. We included 20 cohorts based on inclusion criteria reporting an association between CKD and COVID-19 after excluding irrelevant articles, including review articles and duplicates. We conducted pooled prevalence of CKD and meta-analysis to estimate the odds ratio (OR), 95% confidence interval (CI) using Cochrane RevMan (version 5.4, Copenhagen: The Nordic Cochrane Centre, The Cochrane Collaboration), and R programming language version 4.16-2 (University of Auckland, New Zealand). Our study involved 4350 patients from different countries, and 212 (4.9%) patients had CKD. Among 20 cohorts, 57.27% were male with a median age of 55.5 years. Eight hundred sixty-six patients developed severe COVID-19, and out of which, 39 (4.5%) were CKD patients. CKD patients had a significantly increased risk of severe disease as compared to non-CKD patients with a pooled OR of 2.15 (95% CI 1.16-4.01) (I(2)=41; p=0.02). Out of 443 COIVD-19 patients who died, 85 patients had CKD, with a prevalence of 19.18%. CKD patients had an increased risk of death as compared to non-CKD patients with a pooled OR of 5.58 (95% CI 3.27-9.54) (I(2)=0; p<0.00001). CKD is manifested as a common underlying disease in COVID-19 patients who had a worse prognosis, including mortality.