Observational Study
Copyright ©The Author(s) 2021. Published by Baishideng Publishing Group Inc. All rights reserved.
World J Clin Cases. Jun 26, 2021; 9(18): 4654-4667
Published online Jun 26, 2021. doi: 10.12998/wjcc.v9.i18.4654
Clinical characteristics, gastrointestinal manifestations and outcomes of COVID-19 patients in Iran; does the location matters?
Pooneh Mokarram, Maryam Mehdipour Dalivand, Antonio Pizuorno, Farnaz Aligolighasemabadi, Mohammadamin Sadeghdoust, Ebtesam Sadeghdoust, Farshad Aduli, Gholamreza Oskrochi, Hassan Brim, Hassan Ashktorab
Pooneh Mokarram, Autophagy Research Center, Department of Biochemistry, Shiraz University of Medical Sciences, Shiraz 71348, Iran
Maryam Mehdipour Dalivand, Farshad Aduli, Hassan Brim, Hassan Ashktorab, Department of Medicine, Howard University, Washington, DC 20060, United States
Antonio Pizuorno, Department of Medicine, La Universidad del Zulia, Faculty of Medicine, Maracaibo 4002, Venezuela
Farnaz Aligolighasemabadi, Mohammadamin Sadeghdoust, Department of Internal Medicine, Mashhad Medical Sciences Branch, Islamic Azad University, Mashhad 13131, Iran
Ebtesam Sadeghdoust, Department of Internal Medicine, School of Medicine, Dezful University of Medical Sciences, Dezful 64616, Iran
Gholamreza Oskrochi, Collage of Engineering and Technology, American University of the Middle East, Egaila 54200, Kuwait
Author contributions: Ashktorab H designed the report and wrote the paper; Mokarram P, Dalivand MM, Pizuorno A, Aligolighasemabadi F, Sadeghdous M, Sadeghdoust E, Aduli F and Brim H collected and analyzed the clinical data; Oskrochi G performed statistical analysis.
Institutional review board statement: Local IRB approval obtained from the Health authority in each hospital for the chart review.
Informed consent statement: Written informed consent was waived.
Conflict-of-interest statement: The authors declare no conflicts of interest
STROBE statement: The authors have read the STROBE Statement—checklist of items, and the manuscript was prepared and revised according to the STROBE Statement—checklist of items.
Open-Access: This article is an open-access article which was selected by an in-house editor and fully peer-reviewed by external reviewers. It is distributed in accordance with the Creative Commons Attribution Non Commercial (CC BY-NC 4.0) license, which permits others to distribute, remix, adapt, build upon this work non-commercially, and license their derivative works on different terms, provided the original work is properly cited and the use is non-commercial. See: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/
Corresponding author: Hassan Ashktorab, PhD, Professor, Department of Medicine, Howard University, 2041 Georgia Ave, Washington, DC 20060, United States. hashktorab@howard.edu
Received: January 5, 2021
Peer-review started: January 5, 2021
First decision: January 27, 2021
Revised: February 4, 2021
Accepted: March 29, 2021
Article in press: March 29, 2021
Published online: June 26, 2021
Core Tip

Core Tip: The location of the places the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) impacted in the world varies based on many social and economic factors. We chose and studied four different sites from Iran and determined that hypertension and diabetes as the most common comorbidities, but their distribution was different in COVID-19 patients in the four studied regions of Iran. Nausea, diarrhea, and elevated liver enzymes were the most common gastrointestinal symptoms.