Prevalence of chronic comorbidities in chikungunya: A systematic review and meta-analysis

•There is some evidence that chikungunya virus (CHIKV) disease severity is related to particular comorbidities such as obesity, diabetes, cardiac diseases, and/or asthma.•No study has examined the frequency of chronic comorbidities in severe CHIKV cases.•The present study is the first to systematically describe the prevalence of chronic comorbidities in CHIKV and evaluate their possible contributions to disease severity.•Hypertension, diabetes and cardiac diseases were the most frequent chronic comorbidities in CHIKV patients where they present in about 30%, 20% and 15% of the cases, respectively.•Severe CHIKV cases had significantly higher proportion of diabetes than non-severe cases.•Patients with diabetes had about 20% higher chance to develop severe CHIKV disease compared to those with no diabetes.•The findings of this study may help developing public health measures to avert the severe outcome of the infectious disease in CHIKV patients with comorbidities.