Arch Iran Med. 25(2):126.
doi: 10.34172/aim.2022.21
Author’s Reply
Reply to Cardiac Complications in COVID-19: A Systematic Review and Meta-analysis
Reza Mosaed 1, 2, *
Author information:
1Department of Clinical Pharmacy, School of Medicine, AJA University of Medical Sciences, Tehran, Iran
2Department of Clinical Pharmacy, Faculty of Pharmacy, Tehran University of Medical Sciences, Tehran, Iran
*Corresponding Author: Reza Mosaed, PharmD; School of Medicine, AJA University of Medical Sciences, Etemadzadeh St., West Fatemi St., Tehran, Iran. Tel: +98-21-43822401; Fax: +98-71-32355936; Email:
reza.mosaed@ajaums.ac.ir
Copyright and License Information
© 2022 The Author(s).
This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (
https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
Cite this article as: Mosaed R. Reply to Cardiac Complications in COVID-19: A Systematic Review and Meta-analysis. Arch Iran Med. 2022;25(2):126. doi: 10.34172/aim.2022.21
Author’s Reply
We would like to appreciate Hu et al1 for their accuracy and their letter filling the gaps in our systematic review and meta-analysis. We could not perform the meta-analysis showing the association between creatine kinase-MB elevation and mortality using our included articles due to lack of enough available data. However, because of the importance of creatine kinase-MB, the meta-analysis by Hu et al on data obtained by re-performing the search one year later would make the results more reliable and fill the gaps we could not fill.
In the mentioned systematic review and meta-analysis, we were trying to provide pooled evidence on the newly appearing SARS-CoV-2 virus, and because of the lack of evidence and the importance of time in providing the evidence, we included preprint articles. To account for the growth of the evidence, we re-performed a search on September 13, 2021, using the search strategy we used before in our study. The search led to 127 947 records (PubMed: 25 044, Scopus: 86 696, and Web of Science: 16 207). In comparison with the results obtained by the search performed in our study on April 16, 2020 (Overall: 1094 records, PubMed: 409, Scopus: 464, and Web of Science: 221), there is a more than 100-fold growth in the number of records found. So, even re-performing whole systematic review and meta-analysis using a narrower search strategy and inclusion criteria is a good choice we suggest. Association evaluation performed by Hu et al using more restricted inclusion and exclusion criteria would provide more reliable results, providing the professionals and the society with more pooled evidence and more reliable results.
Conflict of Interest Disclosures
The author has no conflicts of interest.
References
- Hu Q, Cheng C, Li Y, Duan G, Chen S. Elevated creatine kinase-MB is an independent risk factor for mortality of COVID-19: based on adjusted data. Arch Iran Med 2022; 25(2):124-125. doi: 10.34172/aim.2022.20 [Crossref] [ Google Scholar]