Endoscopic Findings in Patients Infected With 2019 Novel Coronavirus in Lombardy, Italy.

Coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) is a major worldwide threat caused by a novel coronavirus, severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2), rapidly spreading to a global pandemic. As of May 11, 2020, 4,176,346 cases have been reported worldwide, 219,814 in Italy, and of them, 81,871 occurred in the Lombardy region.1 Although the respiratory manifestations of COVID-19 have been widely described, the impact on the gastrointestinal (GI) system remains less clear. The reported prevalence of digestive symptoms ranges from 3% to 79%, depending on the setting,2-5 but data on GI endoscopic and histologic findings in COVID-19 patients are lacking. Therefore, the aim of this study is to describe the GI endoscopic and histologic findings in COVID-19 patients.

Preparations and prokinetics.

The evaluation of the importance of bowel preparations, prokinetics and postural tricks for bowel cleanliness, completeness of evaluation, and ultimately for the diagnostic yield of VCE is hampered by several factors. First, most studies are published in abstract form. Second, the methodological quality of the studies is rather low, because randomized comparisons are only a small minority. Third,there is no accepted and validated scale to evaluate bowel cleanliness. For all of these reasons, comparisons between studies are very difficult, and drawing general conclusions is almost impossible. As a consequence, at the Fifth International Conference on Capsule Endoscopy [9], only a limited measure of consensus could be reached on the fact that preparations/prokinetics probably improve the quality of small bowel cleanliness. It also was agreed that it is possible that preps/prokinetics improve GTT, SBTT and completeness of examination, and that keeping the patients recumbent in the right lateral position may shorten the GTT. It was noted, however, that the best type of preparation, and dose and time of administration remain to be determined. Additionally, data on prokinetics and postural tricks are insufficient to reach a firm conclusion. Unanswered questions concern the effect of medications on the diagnostic yield of VCE, whether prokinetics increase the miss rate, whether preparations/prokinetics cause adverse effects and the influence of medications on patient acceptance.

Portal hypertensive enteropathy.

The available data on the use of VCE in patients who have cirrhosis and portal hypertension are inadequate to reach a firm conclusion about the usefulness of this diagnostic tool in this patient population. In fact, only retrospective case series exist, in which the characteristics of the patients are heterogeneous in terms of severity of liver disease and of portal hypertension, etiology of cirrhosis, and indication for VCE. In addition, the controls included in the studies are heterogeneous or poorly described. In spite of this, it appears that in patients with portal hypertension, the small bowel frequently shows mucosal abnormalities. Such abnormalities appear to be particularly frequent in patients who have severe portal hypertension and in those with low hemoglobin levels. The clinical significance of these findings remains undefined, however, especially in view of the fact that small bowel lesions also have been found in about 10% of patients with arthritis not taking nonsteroidal anti-inflammatory drugs and in 13.8% of healthy subjects [41,42]. Therefore,large prospective studies are needed to evaluate the prevalence and clinical significance of small bowel mucosal changes in patients who have cirrhosis. Such studies should compare patients who have cirrhosis with healthy subjects. A comparison between cirrhotic patients with a history of intestinal bleeding and bleeding patients without cirrhosis also would be interesting.

Onset of inflammatory bowel diseases during combined alpha-interferon and ribavirin therapy for chronic hepatitis C: report of two cases.

We report two patients who developed an inflammatory bowel disease (IBD) shortly after beginning combined alpha-interferon and ribavirin treatment for HCV-related chronic hepatitis. The previous clinical history was negative for IBD in both patients, who developed diarrhoea and rectal bleeding 10 days and 6 months, respectively, after the initiation of therapy. The history, therapeutic management and the possible causal relationships of these cases are discussed.