ArticleScientific reports2025
First real-world evidence from the Emilia-Romagna region suggests tamoxifen protects breast cancer patients from COVID-19.
Article in Scientific reports, 2025. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 2 papers.
What it found
Each row is one number read from the abstract, on the scale the paper reported it, with its interval. Left of the dashed line favours the treatment, right favours the comparator. Under each row is the sentence it came from. New to these charts? A ten-minute tutorial.
The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
The trial behind it
Trials whose registry record cites this paper, or whose number appears in the abstract. A trial that started after this paper was published is citing it as background, not reporting it.
Neither the registry nor the abstract names a trial number. If this is a trial report, that itself is worth knowing.
Who cites it
2 citing papers in PubMed.
- Endocrine therapy and COVID-19 outcomes in women with breast cancer: a nationwide register- based matched cohort study.BMC cancer · 2026Article
- Rebalancing immunity: The emerging role of selective estrogen receptor modulators in immunity and autoimmunity.Current trends in immunology · 2025Article
Corrections and comments
PubMed lists nothing against this paper. Absence here is not a guarantee, only a check that was made.
Authors and funding
20 authors.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
COVID-19 severity is uneven between genders. A role for sex hormones is possible and has been postulated. Considering this idea, we hypothesized hormonal therapies might influence the severity of COVID-19 in breast cancer (BC) patients. We mined the Emilia-Romagna region (Italy) registries to compare the rates of hospitalization and mortality by COVID-19 in 2020 amongst 22,987 BC patients treated with tamoxifen, aromatase inhibitors (AIs), fulvestrant, and anti-HER2 therapies (trastuzumab and pertuzumab) in 2020, the latter used as reference group. The hospitalization rate observed in 4719 tamoxifen-treated BC patients was the lowest (0.61%, OR, 0.38; 90% CI, 0.20-0.76; p = 0.03) among hormonal therapies. Importantly, only one COVID-19 fatality was observed in tamoxifen-treated BC patients, who showed a striking 0.02% COVID-19 death frequency as compared to 0.24% observed for the whole BC patients population. In addition, tamoxifen emerged in the sex and age adjusted analysis as the only agent significantly decreasing the standard mortality rate (SMR) by COVID-19 as compared to the regional population consisting of 2,296,559 female residents from the Emilia Romagna region in 2020. Our results show that BC patients are at increased risk of COVID-19 hospitalization and that COVID-19 mortality is hindered by SERM-based therapies like tamoxifen. These findings are relevant to choose adequate treatments in order to protect cancer patients from concomitant SARS-CoV-2 contagion and related symptoms and contribute to the idea that SERMs could be used as prophylactic agents and therapeutics to prevent the progression of severity of COVID-19.
Indexed as
Identifiers
What OpenQuestion holds
Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.