Covid‐19 and the digestive system

By S. Wong, Rashid N Lui, J. Sung. Journal of Gastroenterology and Hepatology, 2020

702 citations recorded by the source corpus.

The novel coronavirus disease is currently causing a major pandemic. It is caused by the severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS‐CoV‐2), a member of the Betacoronavirus genus that also includes the SARS‐CoV and Middle East respiratory syndrome coronavirus. While patients typically present with fever and a respiratory illness, some patients also report gastrointestinal symptoms such as diarrhea, vomiting, and abdominal pain. Studies have identified the SARS‐CoV‐2 RNA in stool specimens of infected patients, and its viral receptor angiotensin converting enzyme 2 was found to be highly expressed in gastrointestinal epithelial cells. These suggest that SARS‐CoV‐2 can actively infect and replicate in the gastrointestinal tract. This has important implications to the disease management, transmission, and infection control. In this article, we review the important gastrointestinal aspects of the disease.

Subfields: Infectious Diseases

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/3e65436966235ca2dcb46b73d2af294109ce4e31

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Citations in the corpus

• COVID-19 and Multiorgan Response (2020, background): “32 The incidence of GI symptoms, alongside the detection of SARS-CoV-2 RNA in stool samples of infected patients 55 , suggest that ACE2 receptors highly expressed in the GI tract are another target for SARS-CoV-2 infection.”