Does breast Cancer have a lower risk of mortality from Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome compared to other types of Cancer? Evidence from Brazil, a heterogeneous population

Abstract

To investigate the prevalence of hospitalizations and deaths related to severe acute respiratory syndrome in Brazilian women diagnosed with breast cancer. A 12-month retrospective study was performed using data from hospitalized women patients resulting from SARS-CoV-2 infection from a national database of acute respiratory lower disease notification forms (ARDL) between January 1 and December 2021. Data from non-pregnant and non-puerperium women> 18 years and with laboratory, COVID-19 diagnosis were selected and analyzed from 1048575 databank patients and categorized into three groups: without cancer diagnosis (WC), with breast cancer (BC), and with a diagnosis of other types of cancer (OC). OC was also sub-categorized in eight types of diagnosed cancer. Mortality and other clinical complications during the hospitalized period were compared between groups by analysis of variance followed by the post hoc Bonferroni test and the chi-square test. The influence of the following covariates was determined by multivariate logistic regression analysis: age, education, ethnicity, previous immunization to COVID-19, and presence of risk comorbidities. Brazilian BC had a lower risk of mortality from ARDL-COVID than those diagnosed OC patients. However, both groups presented a higher mortality risk than WC patients. Conclusions: These results are like some previous studies suggesting that BC lower risk could be a universal phenomenon independent of ethnicity and the presence of other risk comorbidities for COVID-19.