The Effect of Co-Infection of Coronavirus with Hepatitis B

Abstract

INTRODUCTIONThere is insufficient information on how COVID-19 affects people who already have chronic liver diseases like HBV or HCV (El Kassas et al., 2020). On the other hand, COVID-19 co-infection with viral hepatitis shows a greater potential to cause liver damage with worse results and death. In this regard, according to (Qi et al., 2020), despite receiving intensive care, a 53-yearold man with HBV-related cirrhosis, portal hypertension, and ascites passed away 48 days after the onset of the illness from irreversible multiple organ dysfunction syndromes (Qi et al., 2020). According to a different study, those with HBV infection have a higher risk of dying and a higher prevalence of liver cirrhosis, total bilirubin, severe presentations, and hepatic cirrhosis (Chen et al., 2020).The most frequently reported symptoms of liver injury in COVID-19 patients are abnormal liver function and high levels of aspartate aminotransferase or alanine aminotransferase, (Zhang et al., 2020) which have developed in 16.1-53.1% of SARS-CoV-2-infected patients. Liver damage is a common complication of SARS-CoV-2 infection, which can be caused by a direct viral infection of liver cells (Wang et al., 2020; Huang et al., 2020).Human ACE2 Angiotensin-converting enzyme 2 (ACE2) is the host receptor by SARS-CoV-2 to infect human cells. Coronavirus binds to its specific receptor called. Despite reports that ACE2 is expressed in the lung, liver, stomach, ileum, kidney, and colon, particularly in the lung (Jin et al., 2020).