Risk of ischemic stroke in patients recovered from COVID-19 infection: A systematic review and meta-analysis.

BACKGROUND

Data regarding the risk of ischemic stroke within 1 year after the post-acute phase of COVID-19 remain scant. We assess the risk of ischemic stroke in COVID-19 survivors after SARS-CoV-2 infection by performing a systematic review and meta-analysis of the available data.

METHODS

Following the PRISMA guidelines, we searched Medline and Scopus to locate all articles published up to February 11, 2023, reporting the risk of incident ischemic stroke in adult patients recovered from COVID-19 infection compared to non-infected patients (controls) defined as those who did not experience the infection over the same follow-up period. Ischemic stroke risk was evaluated using the Mantel-Haenszel random effects models with adjusted Hazard ratio (HR) as the effect measure with 95% confidence interval (CI) while heterogeneity was assessed using Higgins

RESULTS

Overall, 23,559,428 patients (mean age 56, 1 year, 54.3% males), of whom 1,595,984 had COVID-19, were included. Over a mean follow-up of 9.2 months, ischemic stroke occurred in 4.40 [95% CI: 4.36-4.43] out of 1000 patients survived to COVID-19 compared to 3.25 [95% CI:3.21-3.29] out of 1000 controls. Recovered COVID-19 patients presented a higher risk of ischemic stroke ((HR: 2.06, 95% CI: 1.75-2.41,

CONCLUSIONS

Recovered COVID-19 patients have a higher risk of ischemic stroke compared to subjects from the general population within 9 months from the index infection.

Déclaration de conflit d'intérêts

Declaration of conflicting interestsThe author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.