Cancerona: Challenges of Cancer Management in Times of COVID-19 Pandemic
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COVID-19
Cancerona: Challenges of Cancer Management in Times of COVID-19 Pandemic Farah Ballout 1 & Reem Daouk 1 & Joseph Azar 1 & Michael Timonian 1 & Tarek Araji 1 & Hisham F. Bahmad 1,2 Wassim Abou-Kheir 1
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Accepted: 24 September 2020 # Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020
Abstract Coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) has infected millions of people worldwide and emerged to be the biggest global health threat claiming hundreds of thousands of lives at exponential rates. The severity of the disease increases with old age and presence of underlying health conditions, such as cancer. Managing cancer patients under these circumstances is rather challenging, given their compromised immunity and the overwhelmed health care services by COVID-19 community transmission. Thus, it is prudent to establish common guidelines for the monitoring and treatment of cancer patients. In this review, we comprehensively investigate the various aspects of cancer care during the COVID-19 pandemic, discuss challenges faced while treating cancer patients, and propose potential approaches to manage COVID-19 among this vulnerable population. We also discuss molecular aberrations and genetic changes associated with cancer and their role in affecting the virus’ infectivity and severity. Lastly, we shed light on therapeutic approaches that can encompass both diseases without compromising one over the other. Keywords COVID-19 . SARS-CoV-2 . Cancer . Immune response . Therapeutic target
Introduction Reports of a new acute respiratory illness caused by a new strain of coronavirus, the severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2), have appeared in late December 2019 in Wuhan, China [1, 2]. The disease was announced to be a global pandemic in March 2020 and was termed COVID-19 by the World Health Organization (WHO) [3]. SARS-CoV-2 has infected more than 33 million
This article is part of the Topical Collection on COVID-19 * Hisham F. Bahmad [email protected]; [email protected] * Wassim Abou-Kheir [email protected] 1
Department of Anatomy, Cell Biology, and Physiological Sciences, Faculty of Medicine, American University of Beirut, Beirut, Lebanon
2
Arkadi M. Rywlin M.D. Department of Pathology and Laboratory Medicine, Mount Sinai Medical Center, 4300 Alton Rd, Miami Beach, FL 33140, USA
individuals and caused nearly 1 million deaths worldwide by the end of September 2020 [3]. COVID-19 manifests commonly with mild respiratory symptoms including cough and shortness of breath, accompanied by a moderate to high fever. However, the severity of this disease can widely range from asymptomatic to pneumonitis requiring hospitalization and oxygen support to respiratory dysfunction and multipleorgan failure and ultimately death [1, 2]. Coronaviruses are enveloped single-stranded RNA viruses that cause respiratory, enteric, hepatic, and neurological diseases [4]. Of these species, four are prevalent and associated with common cold symptoms in immunocompetent individuals [5] and two strains originate from animals and have been linke
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