Internal medicine

Gastrointestinal disease

Irritable bowel syndrome

Disease

Coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19)

Infectious disease (medical specialty)

Gastroenterology

Intensive care medicine

Diarrhea

Gastrointestinal tract

Severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2)

Medicine

Clinical Medicine

<h3>ABSTRACT</h3> Although COVID-19 was first recognised as an acute respiratory illness, extra-pulmonary manifestations are increasingly being recognised. Acute gastrointestinal side effects have been well reported with COVID-19 infection and are estimated to affect around 17% of patients. With COVID-19 still being a relatively new illness, the chronic gastrointestinal symptoms are less well characterised. Post-infectious irritable bowel syndrome (IBS) can occur following bacterial and viral infections, and with ACE-2 receptors being shown to be present in the gastrointestinal tract and SARS-Cov-2 RNA being present in stool, SARS-CoV-2 is now appreciated as an enteric pathogen. In our study, we survey acute and chronic gastrointestinal symptoms after COVID-19 infection. We have conducted one of the few UK studies on gastrointestinal symptoms, with the longest follow-up duration of 6 months. We have found that gastrointestinal symptoms are common at 6 months, affecting 43.8% of our patients. Further research is needed to explore whether this represents a new post-COVID-19 IBS, which has not <i>previous</i> been described in the literature, including its clinical course and response to any potential medical therapies.

COVID-19 infection causing residual gastrointestinal symptoms – a single UK centre case series