A Systematic Review of Systematic Reviews on the Incidence of Acute Kidney Injury in COVID-19 Patients Download PDF

The recent COVID-19 pandemic has caused a lot of perturbation all around the globe. The risk of acute kidney injury (AKI) increases manifold during SARS-CoV-2 infection. This systematic review of systematic reviews aims to compile all the evidence on the incidence of AKI in COVID-19 patients, published in the form of systematic reviews. PRISMA guidelines were used to conduct this systematic review of systematic reviews. The comprehensive electronic search was conducted systematically on OVID, Cochrane library, EMBASE, ProQuest, PubMed, ScienceDirect, Scopus, and Web of Science databases up to the 17^th of March 2021. Random effect meta-analysis was performed to assess the overall incidence of AKI in coronavirus patients as well as the associated mortality with 95% confidence of interval. After full-length analysis, only 15 systematic reviews with a total of 265162 coronavirus infected patients were included in the final study. The total sum of AKI patients in the systematic reviews was 24277 (9.15%). After applying the random effect model, it was observed that the overall incidence of AKI was 1 (95% CI: 1%-2%, Heterogenicity I² < 1%, p < 0.001) and mortality associated with AKI in COVID-19 patients was 64 (95% CI: 44%-83%, Heterogenicity I² = 99.32%, p < 0.001). Our study found that the incidence of AKI among COVID-19 patients was very common. Early and judicious clinical evaluation of AKI and the treatment of underlying causes of AKI should be one of the prime focuses of a clinician in the management of coronavirus-associated AKI.