Abstract
Objective: Recently, convalescent plasma (CP) therapy has shown promising evidence in the treatment of several serious contagious diseases, including SARS-CoV, Influenza and Ebola. We conducted a systematic review to extract data about using CP treatment for COVID-19 patients and it’s effectively. Methods: The retrieval of studies was conducted according to Cochrane Collaboration and from electronic databases including PubMed, Medline, and others (medRxiv and BioRxiv). Searching of the available evidence concerning CP treatment of COVID-19 patients was conducted in journal articles published between December 2019 and October 2020. The articles were further screened based on inclusion and exclusion criteria to identify the high-quality studies for analysis. Results: A total of 18 CP studies were included in this review. We found variance regarding the effectiveness of CP in the reduction of mortality rate, length of stay, and increased discharging rate. Several findings show CP therapy is effective in increasing viral negativity, neutralizing antibodies to recipients, does not cause harmful adverse reactions and in some cases can improve clinical symptoms. This therapy is presently considered effective for generating good clinical outcomes when given early in the course of the disease. Conclusion: The effectiveness of CP in terms of mortality, length of stay, and increased discharging patients is still debatable. However, CP therapy is effective in increasing the negativity of SARS-CoV-2 test, neutralizing antibody titer and is safe so it can be considered for COVID-19 patients. CP should not be given in the initial disease course but is recommended for the early disease course.
Highlights
The COVID-19 pandemic is currently a major public health concern and has become a significant and credible threat to economies around the world because the mortality and morbidity rates from this disease are still high
The papers included were the original research reports about the effects of giving convalescent plasma (CP) therapy to patients with COVID‐19, including patients’ discharge and length of stay, improvements in laboratory and radiological findings, viral rate, mortality outcome, clinical benefits and adverse events with study designs including randomized controlled trials, prospective and retrospective comparative cohort studies that were published in scientific journals
Based on the search results using titles and abstracts, we obtained 483 articles about CP therapy for Coronavirus Disease 2019 in the PubMed and Medline database and 521 additional articles were identified from other sources, namely medRxiv
Summary
The COVID-19 pandemic is currently a major public health concern and has become a significant and credible threat to economies around the world because the mortality and morbidity rates from this disease are still high. SARS-CoV-2 is a type of respiratory virus that can cause pneumonia in sufferers, and the first cases appeared in the city of Wuhan, China since December 2019. The World Health Organization (WHO) recently reported the virus had infected 194 million people and caused 4.16 million deaths [6,7,8]. The high incidence, worsening of disease, increasing death rate and the severe impacts caused by the disease have shown few signs of decreasing in most areas of the world. Single therapy from Remdesivir is presently considered effective in treating people with COVID-19 with mild-moderate symptoms, but for COVID-19 sufferers with severe symptoms who use mechanical ventilation (MV) breathing aids, this current treatment is not effective in helping in recovery [11]
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