Prevalence and outcomes of acute pancreatitis in COVID-19: a meta-analysis

The study by Pandanaboyana et al 1 showed that acute pancreatitis (AP) patients with COVID-19 had a significantly higher mortality than those without COVID-19. Nevertheless, a similar trend of mortality was found by another observational cohort study.2 The true prevalence and outcomes of AP in patients with COVID-19 are not known. The aim of this study was to conduct a meta-analysis to determine the pooled prevalence and clinical outcomes of AP in patients with COVID-19. PubMed, Embase, Scopus and Cochrane library were searched for outcome studies of adult patients with AP and COVID-19 published before 15 September 2021 (online supplemental file 1). Excluded were studies that either did not use the revised Atlanta criteria for AP diagnosis or reported patients with COVID-19 with a prior history of pancreatitis. Patients were divided into three groups: group I—AP with COVID-19, group II—AP without COVID-19 and group III—COVID-19 without AP. The primary endpoint was mortality (both in-hospital or 30-day). Secondary endpoints were pooled prevalence of AP and other clinical outcomes. The overall pooled prevalence and mortality were assessed for group I with a random-effects model and Freeman–Tukey …