Clinical, inflammatory, and immune differences between COVID-19 patients with and without cancer A protocol for systematic review and meta-analysis

Introduction: The World Health Organization announce that novel coronavirus (COVID-19) is pandemic worldwide on March 11, 2020. In this pandemic, cancer patients are prone to become critically ill after being infected with COVID-19 due to special immune conditions, and cannot effectively benefit from the treatment plan designed for normal people. However, only a few literatures report the differences between cancer patients and normal people after being infected with COVID-19. There is no systematic review to evaluate the clinical, inflammatory, and immune differences between COVID-19 patients with and without cancer. The systematic review aims to summarize and analyze the clinical, inflammatory, and immune differences between them. Methods and analysis: We plan to conduct a systematic review according to the Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Review and Meta-analysis Protocols (PRISMA-P) guidelines. Several databases (PubMed/MEDLINE, Embase, Web of Science, The Cochrane Library, CNKI, CBM, VIP, WanFang) were searched for relevant eligible observational studies on COVID-19 patients with cancer published from December 2019 to September 2020. Two researchers (Y.ZY and W.PP) will independently complete search strategy formulation, literature selecting, Information extraction, data collation, and quality assessment. The primary outcome will be the clinical characteristics differences between COVID-19 patients with and without cancer. Secondary outcomes will include immune function regulation characteristics such as T cell subset status, inflammation and other factors for COVID-19 patients with cancer. We intend to perform a meta-analysis of studies calculating odds ratio differences (Hedge g) for comparison in Forest plots and subgroup analysis after assessment of heterogeneity using I-2 statistics based on compatibility on the basis of population and outcomes. Ethics and dissemination: We will use the information from published researches with no need for ethical assessment. Our findings will be published in a peer-reviewed journal according to the PRISMA guidelines. PROSPERO registration number: CRD42020204417