Smoking Is Associated With COVID-19 Progression: A Meta-analysis

<jats:title>Abstract</jats:title> <jats:sec> <jats:title>Introduction</jats:title> <jats:p>Smoking depresses pulmonary immune function and is a risk factor contracting other infectious diseases and more serious outcomes among people who become infected. This paper presents a meta-analysis of the association between smoking and progression of the infectious disease COVID-19.</jats:p> </jats:sec> <jats:sec> <jats:title>Methods</jats:title> <jats:p>PubMed was searched on April 28, 2020, with search terms “smoking”, “smoker*”, “characteristics”, “risk factors”, “outcomes”, and “COVID-19”, “COVID”, “coronavirus”, “sar cov-2”, “sar cov 2”. Studies reporting smoking behavior of COVID-19 patients and progression of disease were selected for the final analysis. The study outcome was progression of COVID-19 among people who already had the disease. A random effects meta-analysis was applied.</jats:p> </jats:sec> <jats:sec> <jats:title>Results</jats:title> <jats:p>We identified 19 peer-reviewed papers with a total of 11,590 COVID-19 patients, 2,133 (18.4%) with severe disease and 731 (6.3%) with a history of smoking. A total of 218 patients with a history of smoking (29.8%) experienced disease progression, compared with 17.6% of non-smoking patients. The meta-analysis showed a significant association between smoking and progression of COVID-19 (OR 1.91, 95% confidence interval [CI] 1.42-2.59, p = 0.001). Limitations in the 19 papers suggest that the actual risk of smoking may be higher.</jats:p> </jats:sec> <jats:sec> <jats:title>Conclusions</jats:title> <jats:p>Smoking is a risk factor for progression of COVID-19, with smokers having higher odds of COVID-19 progression than never smokers.</jats:p> </jats:sec> <jats:sec> <jats:title>Implications</jats:title> <jats:p>Physicians and public health professionals should collect data on smoking as part of clinical management and add smoking cessation to the list of practices to blunt the COVID-19 pandemic.</jats:p> </jats:sec>