Gastrointestinal involvement attenuates COVID-19 severity and mortality

ABSTRACT

Given that gastrointestinal (GI) symptoms are a prominent extrapulmonary manifestation of coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19), we investigated the impact of GI infection on disease pathogenesis in three large cohorts of patients in the United States and Europe. Unexpectedly, we observed that GI involvement was associated with a significant reduction in disease severity and mortality, with an accompanying reduction in key inflammatory proteins including IL-6, CXCL8, IL-17A and CCL28 in circulation. In a fourth cohort of COVID-19 patients in which GI biopsies were obtained, we identified severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus-2 (SARS-CoV-2) within small intestinal enterocytes for the first time in vivo but failed to obtain culturable virus. High dimensional analyses of GI tissues confirmed low levels of cellular inflammation in the GI lamina propria and an active downregulation of key inflammatory genes including IFNG, CXCL8, CXCL2 and IL1B among others. These data draw attention to organ-level heterogeneity in disease pathogenesis and highlight the role of the GI tract in attenuating SARS-CoV-2-associated inflammation with related mortality benefit.