Gastrointestinal sequalae months after severe acute respiratory syndrome corona virus 2 infection: a prospective, observational study

Introduction Post-coronavirus disease (post-COVID) symptoms arise mostly from impaired function of respiratory tract although in many patients, the dysfunction of gastrointestinal tract and liver among other organ systems may persist. Methods Primary data collection was based on a short gastrointestinal symptom questionnaire at the initial screening. A brief telephone survey within the patient and control group was performed 5–8 months after the initial screening. R ver. 4.0.5 and imbalanced RandomForest (RF) machine-learning algorithm were used for data explorations and analyses. Results A total of 590 patients were included in the study. The general presence of gastrointestinal symptoms 208.2 days (153–230 days) after the initial acute severe acute respiratory syndrome corona virus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) infection was 19% in patients with moderate-to-serious course of the disease and 7.3% in patients with mild course compared with 3.0% in SARS-CoV-2 negative controls (P
Source: European Journal of Gastroenterology and Hepatology - Category: Gastroenterology Tags: Original Articles: Gastroenterology Source Type: research