A meta-analysis showed that COVID-19 was present in individuals with inflammatory bowel disease at an overall prevalence of 6.10%. The goal of Maheeba Abdulla et al. was to determine the connection between COVID-19 outcomes and inflammatory bowel disease. Utilizing databases such as Cochrane Library, Embase, Scopus, and Medline/PubMed, the literature search was carried out. To find out other pertinent publications, a snowball search was conducted in MedRxiv, Research Gate, Google Scholar, and Google.

To find out any other relevant articles, bibliographic research was also carried out. The consequences, risks, and incidence of COVID-19 in adult inflammatory bowel disease patients were examined in quantitative observational studies like case-control, cross-sectional, and cohort studies that were published in the English language.

The outcomes of interest were mortality, COVID-19 incidence and risk, COVID-19 hospitalization, and COVID-19 severity. For quality evaluation, the Joanna Briggs Institute critical appraisal checklist was utilized. To investigate the robustness and heterogeneity of the data, a sensitivity analysis and subgroup analysis were carried out, respectively.

Out of 2828 non-duplicate records, 86 studies in total were taken into account for this study. The studies were from settings including the general public, hospitals, medical institutions, or inflammatory bowel disease centres and were multicentric or single internationally. Majority of the studies were noted to be of good quality with a manageable risk of bias. In the population with inflammatory bowel disease, the pooled prevalence of mortality, severe COVID-19, COVID-19 hospitalization, and COVID-19 is depicted in Table 1:

The risk of mortality, severe COVID-19, COVID-19 hospitalization, and COVID-19 were not substantially correlated with inflammatory bowel disease. On the other hand, the risk of severe COVID-19 (OR 2.45), COVID-19 hospitalization (OR 1.28), and COVID-19 (OR 1.37) were all significantly increased by ulcerative colitis. A lower risk of severe COVID-19 (OR 0.48) was shown to be strongly correlated with Crohn's disease.

It was possible that the type of inflammatory bowel disease played a role in the increased degree of heterogeneity. The likelihood of COVID-19 infection, hospitalization for COVID-19 infection, and severe COVID-19 infection were all profoundly associated with ulcerative colitis. Patients with Crohn's disease or those with non-specific inflammatory bowel disease did not exhibit this connection.