Various Treatment Modalities in COVID-19 Associated Facial Mucormycosis and the Need for its Surgical Management: A Systematic Review.

INTRODUCTION: Mucormycosis emerged as a wildfire in post-covid-19 infected patients. Most frequently involved sites of mucormycosis are rhino-orbital, rhino-sinusal and rhino-orbito-cerebral. The hallmark sign of mucormycosis is tissue necrosis, which is often a late sign. The fatality rate of mucormycosis is 46% globally. Despite early aggressive combined surgical and medical therapy, the prognosis of mucormycosis is poor.

METHODS: We searched the electronic database of PubMed, web of science, Embase, Scopus and Google Scholar from Jan 2020 until December 2021 using keywords. We retrieved all the granular details of original research articles, case reports/series of patients with rhino-orbito-cerebral mucormycosis (ROCM), and COVID-19 reported worldwide. Subsequently, we analyzed the patient characteristics, associated comorbidities, location of mucormycosis, treatment given and its outcome in people with COVID-19. (Prospero registration-CRD42021256830, June 4, 2021).

RESULTS: Overall, 544 rhino-orbito-cerebral mucormycosis patients were included in our review with a history of Covid-19 infection. Out of which 410 patients had diabetes mellitus which has proven to be major contributing immunocompromised disease. Other diseases like hypertension, chronic kidney diseases, hypothyroidism, etc., were also attributed as an immunocompromised disease causing increased number of covid associated mucormycosis cases. We found out that total number of patients alive after taking only antifungal drug treatment were 25 in number, whereas total number of patients alive when antifungal drugs were combined with surgical intervention were 428 which was significantly higher.

CONCLUSION: Our systematic review concluded that surgical debridement should be performed whenever feasible in parallel to antifungal treatment in order to reduce the mortality rate of COVID-19 associated rhino-orbito-cerebral mucormycosis patients.