COVID-19 mortality for cancer patients is driven by age, gender and comorbidities but not by whether they are on cytotoxic chemotherapy or other anticancer treatments, a recent study suggests.

Researchers from the UK drew their data from a network of 55 cancer centres with a patient population of nearly 1.5 million people with active cancer.

They used prospective data on 800 patients from the UK Coronavirus Cancer Monitoring Project.

All had active cancer, about half had metastatic cancer, and all were diagnosed with COVID-19 infections between 18 March and 26 April, 2020.