The Prevalence Of Dysphagia In Patients With Covid-19: A Systematic Review And Meta-Analysis

Abstract

The world has been suffering from COVID-19 since 2019. It is thought that there’s a high risk of dysphagia in patients with COVID-19. Therefore, the purpose of this study was to estimate the prevalence of dysphagia in patients affected by COVID-19 in admission (day 0), discharge, and 3-6 months post-discharge. Only English papers reporting dysphagia in COVID19 patients were included. Case reports and review studies were excluded. The authors searched Web of Science, Google Scholar, Scopus, and PubMed from January 1, 2020, until July 1, 2022. In this study, the effect sizes and standard errors were used to estimate the amount of dysphagia in these patients. Random effects were used for statistical analysis. Of the 2736 identified studies, 19 articles (n = 5334 patients) were included in the meta-analysis. The pooled prevalence of dysphagia in COVID-19 patients at admission (n=643 patients), discharge (n=2286 patients), long-term (n=2405 patients), and the total was 32% (SE=0.13), 29% (SE=0.04), 14% (SE=0.03), and 24% (SE=0.03), respectively. About a quarter of COVID-19 patients may have dysphagia during the acute phase and/or also in the post-acute phase of the disease. Therefore, one should be aware of the symptoms of dysphagia and treat it in time.