¹Aryan Mohamadfatih Jalal, ¹Sheelan Faroz Aref

¹Kurdistan Board For Medical Specialties

Background:

World Health Organization (WHO) deemed it as a global pandemic of COVID-19 infection on 11 March 2020. Evidence on smoking impacting the disease progression and death in COVID-19 infected patients is still conflicting. Moreover, some studies showed that there was no relation between COVID-19 severity and smoking, whereas other studies reported that smoking was associated with severity and mortality.
Smoking increases the risk of viral and bacterial infection, and it is a putative risk factor for the Middle East Respiratory Syndrome Coronavirus infection. To date, there is no strong evidence that the smokers protected against SARS-CoV-2 infection. Moreover, there is on-going evidence that smokers have worse outcomes than non-smokers after contracting the virus.
Objective of the study was to correlate the smoking with the disease severity of COVID-19 infection

Method(s):

The study was an observational cross-sectional study, A sample of thousand (1000) of COVID-19 infected patients were conducted in the Iraqi Kurdistan Region; the participants were treated at COVID-19 centres. the patients who confirmed to have COVID-19 infection based on one or more of the followings – Real Time Polymerase Chain Reaction (RT-PCR) by nasopharyngeal swab, CT scan of the chest, as well as serological tests were included
Patient’s Characteristics were taken including smoking habits. The study lasted from 15 August 2020 to 15 June 2021.

Results:

Among 1000 COVID-19 patients, recovery was high in both groups of smokers and nonsmokers (92.4%,94.2) respectively
over half of the smokers had either severe disease (51.1%) or critical disease (3.3%) compared with 39.3% and 2.6% among the non-smokers (p = 0.015) respectively
As shown in figure highest age group in both smokers and nonsmokers were age (30-50 years), and highest percentage were in nonsmoker age category (30-50 years) (41.60%) p value was 0.22 which is not significant