Telomere length in subjects with and without SARS-CoV-2 infection: a systematic review and meta-analysis

This is the authors' abstract. We don't add key points for this paper.

Embase, Cochrane, Web of Science, Literatura Latino Americana e do Caribe em Ciências da Saúde (LILACS), SciELO, and China National Knowledge Infrastructure (Figure 1).No limitations were placed during the search.The following keywords were used for this search: "telomere length," "telomerase," "telomerase activity," "COVID-19," "coronavirus disease 2019," "SARS-CoV-2," and "severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus."We searched observational studies that evaluated the telomere length or telomerase activity in COVID-19 patients and uninfected subjects by SARS-CoV-2 (control group) between December 2019 and November 25, 2023, with validated laboratory tests or consistent clinical definition of the healthy control group.We excluded case reports, systematic reviews, scoping and narrative reviews, conference abstracts, and other publications lacking primary data.After the elimination of duplicates, the titles and abstracts were independently reviewed by three authors.Articles with all inclusion criteria were assessed for their content extraction (Figure 1).The retrieved literature was also reviewed for the identification of additional studies.The following information was obtained from the articles: title, author, country, year of publication, study design, age,