“We are faced by the worldwide spread of a disease that was nonexistent less than a year ago,” Féline P.B. Kroon, MD, and associates said in Annals of the Rheumatic Diseases. “To date, no robust evidence is available to allow strong conclusions on the effects of COVID-19 in patients with RMDs or whether RMDs or [their] treatment impact incidence of infection or outcomes.”
When it comes to quantity of evidence, “the exponential increase in publications over time is evident,” they said. From Jan. 1, 2019 to June 24, 2020, there were 1,725 hits on PubMed for published reports combining COVID-19 with RMDs and drugs used in RMDs. At the beginning of the year, there were only 135 such publications.
The early start of the search, well before identification of the novel coronavirus in China, was meant to ensure that nothing was missed, so “citations that came up in the first months of 2019 mostly encompass papers about other coronaviruses, such as SARS and MERS,” said Dr. Kroon of Zuyderland Medical Center, Heerlen, the Netherlands, when asked for clarification.
The quality of that evidence, however, is another matter. A majority of publications (60%) are “viewpoints or (narrative) literature reviews, and only a small proportion actually presents original data in the form of case reports or case series (15%), observational cohort studies (10%), or clinical trials (<1%),” the investigators explained.
Very few of the published studies, about 10%, specifically involve COVID-19 and RMDs. Even well-regarded sources such as systematic literature reviews or meta-analyses, “which will undoubtedly appear more frequently in the next few months in response to requests by users who feel overwhelmed by a multitude of data, will not eliminate the internal bias present in individual studies,” Dr. Kroon and associates wrote.
The lack of evidence also brings into question one particular form of guidance: recommendations “issued by groups of the so-called experts and (inter)national societies, such as, among others, American College of Rheumatology and European League Against Rheumatism,” the investigators said.
“The rapid increase in research on COVID-19 is encouraging,” but at the same time it “also poses risks of ‘information overload’ or ‘fake news,’ ” they said. “As researchers and clinicians, it is our responsibility to carefully interpret study results that emerge, even more so in this ‘digital era,’ in which published data can quickly have a large societal impact.”
SOURCE: Kroon FPB et al. Ann Rheum Dis. 2020 Aug 12. doi: 10.1136/annrheumdis-2020-218483.