Registry on NEN Patients and COVID-19

Overview

A huge number of initiatives about COVID-19 are ongoing and a growing number of publications regard the correlation between cancer patients in general and SARS-CoV-2 infection. Although it has been reported that cancer patients are at a higher risk of SARS-CoV-2 infection and COVID-19 complications, data collection about cases of NEN patients SARS-CoV-2 positive are scattered and related to single countries or institutions. Because of that and due to the rarity and heterogeneity of NEN it will be hard to have homogeneous, reliable, representative and reproducible data for drawing adequate clinical recommendations about NEN patients and COVID-19. Therefore we propose a global collection of data through an international database to describe and monitor NEN patients with SARS-CoV-2 infection. This retrospective/prospective collection of data can create a solid basis to check frequence of events, clinical management, clinical outcome, demographic, geographical, clinical and biological correlations. This will be helpful for the clinical and scientific community to get reliable information for a homogeneous clinical management of NEN patients during COVID-19 pandemic. The main goal is to get the as wide as possible representativity of the world situation.

At the end of December 2019, several cases of pneumonia of unknown origin were diagnosed in Wuhan, in the province of Hubei, China. These cases have been linked to a new beta-coronavirus (COVID-19), identified with RT-PCR method from samples taken from the bronchoalveolar samples of a patient with pneumonia of unknown etiology in the Wuhan Jinyintan hospital. Severe acute respiratory coronavirus 2 syndrome (SARS-CoV-2) has spread rapidly worldwide causing a pandemic. Cancer patients are considered at greater risk of viral infection and its complications, including SARS-CoV-2. Certain types of cancer, such as thoracic cancers, and underlying clinical conditions, for instance concomitant immunosuppressive therapies or immune-related comorbidities, are factors potentially predisposing to an increased risk of infection and eventually complications of COVID-19. In this context, it is difficult to understand where and how to identify patients with neuroendocrine neoplasia (NEN). We propose a global collection of data through an international database to describe and monitor NEN patients with COVID-19. This retrospective/prospective collection of data can create a large basis to check frequency of events, clinical management, clinical outcome, demographic, geographical, clinical and biological correlations.