Effect of antiplatelet treatments on patients with COVID-19 infection: A systematic review and meta-analysis

Despite the rationale that early anti-platelet would lower the risk of major organ dysfunction, the effectiveness of this approach remains controversial. Therefore, we perform a systematic review and meta-analysis to investigate the effect of antiplatelet treatments on patients with COVID-19 infection. An electronic search was carried out in Pubmed, Embase, Cochrane library, Web of Science, MEDLINE, Wanfang and China National Knowledge Infrastructure (CNKI). Meta-analysis and statistical analyses were completed with using the RevMan 5.3 and Stata 12.0. A total of 9 articles representing data from 5970 participants were included in this study. The meta-analysis showed antiplatelet agents were not associated with higher risk of severe COVID-19 disease (OR = 0.98, 95%CI: 0.64 to 1.50, P = 0.94; I 2 = 65%), while an adjusted analysis indicated that antiplatelet agents was not associated with an increased risk of mortality (OR = 0.65, 95%CI: 0.40 to 1.06, P = 0.498; I 2 = 0%). The results of this study reveal that while there is no significant benefit on mortality demonstrated with the use of antiplatelet agents, the upper bound of the confidence interval suggests that there is unlikely to be a compelling risk of harm associated with this practice. The benefit and risk of the use of antiplatelet agents should be fully considered especially in the presence of thrombocytopenia status in patients with COVID-19. (C) 2021 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

Automated summary

This study found that the use of antiplatelet agents does not have a significant impact on the risk of severe COVID-19 disease or mortality. However, the benefit and risk of using these agents should be fully considered, especially in the presence of thrombocytopenia in COVID-19 patients.