Influence of patient's age on the clinical presentation, morbidity, and mortality in COVID-19: A brief review

ABSTRACT

Currently, COVID-19 is spreading rapidly and presenting with different clinical features with different mortality rates worldwide. In the initial days of the pandemic, most of the patients presented with the complaints of lower respiratory tract infection of varying severity, and most of the deaths were also attributable to respiratory failure. As time progressed, more atypical presentations and causes of mortality were encountered according to different age groups. In the present scenario, a surge of COVID-19 cases is expected. Those new cases will also include patients with various problems requiring surgical interventions. In this brief review, we have discussed various presentations and mortality risks of COVID-19 infections in different age groups. We did literature searched on the PubMed database and included studies published in 2019 and 2020. Altogether, 503 articles were retrieved out of which 31 were analyzed to put up this summary. Important atypical findings in neonates and infants were axial hypotonia, drowsiness, moaning sound, intussusception, and late-onset neonatal sepsis with the cause of death being multi-organ failure. Frequently reported comorbidities among children were hydronephrosis, leukemia, and intussusception. Observed risk factors for unfavorable outcome in the adult population were obesity, HIV, tuberculosis, and the intake of immunosuppressive agents in the form of anticancer drugs and steroids. The factors adding to the vulnerability in the elderly population could be enumerated as diabetes, hypertension, ischemic heart diseases, obesity, and cancers. © 2020 Bali Journal of Anesthesiology ;Published by Wolters Kluwer-Medknow.