Acute abdomen in patients with covid-19: an integrative review

INTRODUCTION: upon infection with SARS-CoV-2, patients presented with non-classical symptoms, such as gastrointestinal phenomena including loss of appetite, nausea, vomiting, diarrhea, and abdominal pain abdominal pain. These occurrences, typically, were found in severely affected patients with COVID-19. With this, the aim of this paper is to analyze the available knowledge on the development of acute abdomen in SARS-CoV-2 infected patients. METHODOLOGY: this is an Integrative Review in PubMed, Web of Science and VHL databases. The following descriptors were used: “Acute abdomen”, “COVID-19”, “Abdominal pain” and “SARS-CoV-2” with the Boolean operator “AND”, and articles relevant to the theme were selected. Initially, 331 articles were selected, all published between 2020 and 2023, in Portuguese and/or English. After analysis, 11 articles matched the proposed objective. RESULTS: the relationship between tenderness in the right upper region or the presence of Murphy’s sign contributed in the association between abdominal pain and the more severe forms of COVID-19 in infected patients. The number of diagnoses for acute conditions such as cholecystitis, appendicitis, diverticulitis and pancreatitis decreased with the pandemic, but at the same time there was an increase in the duration of surgical procedures and in the length of hospital stays. These acute abdominal conditions were the result of delayed demand for hospital care, which also contributed to an increase in the conversion rate to open surgery and in the number of perforative conditions. CONCLUSION: the development of acute abdomen in SARS-CoV-2 infected patients was predictive of an unfavorable prognosis.