Overweight/obesity aggravates hospital complications in hospitalized patients with COVID-19: a systematic review

Abstract

Coronavirus disease (COVID-19) has become a pandemic and patients with overweight and obesity have been reported to be at increased risk for complications from COVID-19. In this context, the objective of the present systematic review was to demonstrate the evidence relating the association or not of overweight and obesity with the prevalence of complications and worst prognosis in hospitalized COVID-19 patients. PubMed, Scielo, Lilacs, JMIR, ScienceDirect, Springer, Wiley and Web of Science were used to identify studies published in the period from 2020 to 2021.  This work was conducted based on the Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Reviews and Meta-Analyses (PRISMA) and PICOS approach. The review included non-randomized or randomized controlled clinical trials, cohort, case-control, cross-sectional and observational studies, and the patient’s included in the studies should present overweight or obesity and COVID-19. From 395 articles, 49 studies met the scope of the review and were selected to be evaluated in this systematic review. According to the selected articles, it was observed that most patients hospitalized with COVID-19 were overweight/obese, elderly (mean age between 60 and 65 years old) and male. Overweight and obesity significantly contributed to increase the incidence of complications as longer hospital stay, invasive mechanical ventilation, non-invasive ventilation, kidney injury, septic shock, heart injury and ICU admission, increasing the rate of deaths. It was observed that the overweight and obesity significantly contributed to increase the incidence of complications and promote a worst prognosis in those patients, being present in most hospital complications.