RESULTS
A total of 1,017 children without cancer or any comorbidities and 257
pediatric patients with cancer or treated with alloHSCT (including 3
patients who received alloHSCT for non-oncological diseases), and
infected with SARS-CoV-2 between March 1st, 2020 and March 1st, 2022,
were reported.
There were 109 reported patients diagnosed with solid tumors, 34 with
lymphoma, 9 with acute myeloid leukemia, 81 with ALL (38 of them in
maintenance), 20 alloHSCT recipients (14 of whom were less than 300 days
post-transplantation).
Table 1 represents the characteristics of the infection in which
significant differences were found between children without
comorbidities and children with cancer/alloHSCT.
No differences were found in the distribution by sex , neither in
contagion at school between children with and without cancer (0,5% vs
2,9%, p 0,062)
Within the group of patients with cancer/alloHSCT, vaccinated patients
did not require oxygen while 5.9% of the unvaccinated patients did.
However, these differences were not statistically significant (p =
0.338). Patients who had received chemotherapy(CT) or radiotherapy(RT)
in the last 30 days before infection did not require more oxygen support
(5% and 0% respectively) than patients who had not received CT/RT
(6.7% and 6.7%) or received it later (7.7% and 6.2%).
Table 2 summarizes the outcomes comparing cancer/alloHSCT subgroups and
children without comorbidities.
Of the 4 patients with cancer/alloHSCT who died from COVID-19, none were
vaccinated, 3 of them had received recent alloHSCT, 1 with primary
immunodeficiency and 2 with ALL, and one patient had a progressive
diffuse midline glioma, with a severe neurological deficit, obesity and
palliative care. Therefore we analyzed the impact of other comorbidities
in children with cancer, 9.9% of children with both cancer and other
comorbidities required oxygen, compared to 2.2% for those with cancer
and without comorbidities (p0.043). When comparing patients with cancer
and any other comorbidities to those with neither cancer nor other
comorbidities, the former had lower oxygen need (9.6% vs 30.8%,
p<0.001).
During the period of the Omicron variant, the number of cancer
patients registered was higher but milder than those from previous waves
(p 0.181).