Poor gut health may adversely affect COVID-19 prognosis
People infected with COVID-19 experience a wide range of symptoms and severities, the most commonly reported including high fevers and respiratory problems. However, autopsy and other studies have also revealed that the infection can affect the liver, kidney, heart, spleen and even the gastrointestinal tract. A sizeable fraction of patients hospitalized with breathing problems also have diarrhea, nausea and vomiting, suggesting that when the virus does get involved in the GI tract it increases the severity of the disease.
In a review published this week in
mBio, microbiologist Heenam Stanley Kim, Ph.D, from Korea University s Laboratory for Human-Microbial Interactions, in Seoul, examined emerging evidence suggesting that poor gut health adversely affects COVID-19 prognosis. Based on his analysis, Kim proposed that gut dysfunction and its associated leaky gut may exacerbate the severity of infection by enabling the virus to
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01-12-2021
By
Earth.com staff writer
Poor gut health may increase the severity of COVID-19, which is often accompanied by gastrointestinal symptoms like diarrhea. According to the American Society for Microbiology, a growing collection of evidence shows that having an altered gut microbiome allows the virus to gain entry into the GI tract.
Dr. Heenam Stanley Kim, an expert at the Korea University Laboratory for Human-Microbial Interactions, reports that gut dysfunction may exacerbate the severity of infection by enabling the virus to access the surface of the digestive tract and internal organs.
COVID-19 patients experience a wide range of symptoms, the most common of which are high fevers and respiratory problems. Autopsies have confirmed that COVID-19 infection can also affect the liver, kidney, heart, spleen, and the gastrointestinal tract. These organs are vulnerable to infection because they have a number of ACE2 receptors that are targeted