Posted: April 4, 2020

In a recent posting, Dr. Stark gave several reasons why he thought patients being treated for cancer would be more likely to die from COVID-19.   Click here to see the posting.  Now comes a study from Cancer Discovery, a publication of the American Association for Cancer Research, that confirms his suspicions.  From China, the study tracked people being treated for cancer and age-matched controls, all of whom developed COVID-19.  The cancer patients had much worse outcomes — especially those with blood cancers, lung cancer and stage 4 metastatic cancer.  The blood cancers are easy to understand: they are usually associated with alterations the immune system — how the body fights infections.  The lung cancer patients and stage 4 patients were probably all undernourished — quite common with those conditions, but not explicitly stated in the study.  This is the first such paper.  Stay tuned; there will be more.