• Giovanni Vitale, Stefano Gitto, Fabio Marra, and Maria Cristina Morelli.
• Internal Medicine Unit for the Treatment of Severe Organ Failure, Dipartimento delle insufficienze d'organo e dei trapianti, IRCCS Azienda Ospedaliero-Universitaria di Bologna, Policlinico di Sant'Orsola, Via Albertoni 15, Bologna, Italy. giovanni.vitale@aosp.bo.it.
• Intern Emerg Med. 2022 Jan 1; 17 (1): 152415-24.

AbstractIn 2020, the severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) also known as coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) disrupted global health, causing hundreds of thousands of deaths worldwide. The liver injury appears to be one of the possible systemic manifestations of COVID-19 disease although the mechanisms causing such injury are not entirely clear. At the beginning of the pandemic, patients with chronic diseases, such as liver cirrhosis, or special populations, such as liver transplant recipients, were considered at higher risk of complications and poor clinical outcomes. Thus, the national transplant programmes have been severely hampered by the COVID-19 pandemic. Furthermore, liver transplant patients are potentially more vulnerable to SARS-CoV-2 infection due to immune suppression, ageing, and metabolic or cardiovascular comorbidities. This review analyses the increasing amounts of data collected in recent months concerning liver cirrhosis and liver transplants to understand if this finding is still relevant with respect to COVID-19 manifestations.© 2021. Società Italiana di Medicina Interna (SIMI).

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