To investigate sex-related differences in coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) prognosis of patients affected by systemic lupus erythematosus (SLE).
We analyzed the data of the national surveillance study promoted by the Italian Society for Rheumatology (CONTROL-19 database) including patients with RMD and COVID-19(molecular diagnosis for SARS-CoV-2). The main objective of the analysis was the combined outcome death or mechanical ventilation. To evaluate the differences between male and female patients, categorical variable were analysed using either the Pearson’s Chi-squared test or the Fisher’s exact test, while quantitative variables were examined using Mann-Whitney test.
We included 80 patients with SLE (86.25% F, mean age 50.2 years, 53.8% active disease). Compared to women, men more often reported anosmia (54.5 vs 30.2%), dysgeusia (36.4 vs 30.6%), death (9.1 vs 4.3%), and combined outcome (9.1 vs 4.3%). Women were more often affected by abdominal pain (12.3 vs 0%), diarrhoea (24.2 vs 18.2%), nausea/vomiting (15.2 vs 0%), headache (38.8 vs 18.2%), pneumonia (26.9 vs 18.2%), more often were hospitalized (33.3 vs 27.3%), and required mechanical ventilation (1.4 vs 0%). All these differences did not reach statistical significance, probably due to the low number of patients studied.
Although our sample is too small to obtain significative differences and draw definitive conclusions, our data suggest that among lupus patients affected by COVID-19 men have a worse prognosis, even if women more often underwent hospitalization and mechanical ventilation.