Comparative Study on Clinical Characteristics of COVID-19 Patients with or without Digestive Symptoms in Razi Hospital, Ahvaz, Khuzestan.

Abstract

Most commonly reported clinical manifestations are fever, fatigue and dry cough. Interestingly, a small percentage of patients experience GI symptoms, with the most common being anorexia, diarrhea, nausea and vomiting. We aimed to conduct a comparative study on COVID-19 patients with or without gastrointestinal patients (GI). The pandemic of coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) has emerged as a dire health problem, causing a massive crisis for global health. Collective data of clinical manifestations and laboratory reports of patients admitted to Razi Hospital, Ahvaz, Khuzestan, Iran, for two weeks were analyzed. Our results showed that GI symptoms are not statistically significant criteria to be predictive or prognostic factors in COVID-19 patients, although they are probably related to the acute or non-acute phase of the disease. Moreover, non-specific GI symptoms seem to result from cytokine storm that occurred during the disease. Therefore, our results did not support GI tract involvement as a common route of COVID- 19 infection. Maybe future research will shed light on why and how the gastrointestinal system becomes infected by COVID-19.