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World J Gastrointest Surg. Jun 27, 2021; 13(6): 548-562
Published online Jun 27, 2021. doi: 10.4240/wjgs.v13.i6.548
Association between acute pancreatitis and COVID-19 infection: What do we know?
Beata Jabłońska, Marek Olakowski, Sławomir Mrowiec
Beata Jabłońska, Marek Olakowski, Sławomir Mrowiec, Department of Digestive Tract Surgery, Medical University of Silesia, Katowice 40-752, Poland
Author contributions: Jabłońska B wrote this paper; Olakowski M and Mrowiec S revised this paper; all authors have read and approved the final manuscript.
Conflict-of-interest statement: No conflict of interest exists.
Open-Access: This article is an open-access article that was selected by an in-house editor and fully peer-reviewed by external reviewers. It is distributed in accordance with the Creative Commons Attribution NonCommercial (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: Beata Jabłońska, MD, PhD, Adjunct Professor, Department of Digestive Tract Surgery, Medical University of Silesia, Medyków 14, Katowice 40-752, Poland. bjablonska@poczta.onet.pl
Received: February 14, 2021
Peer-review started: February 14, 2021
First decision: March 16, 2021
Revised: March 25, 2021
Accepted: May 8, 2021
Article in press: May 8, 2021
Published online: June 27, 2021
Core Tip

Core Tip: Severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) appears to be a new etiological infectious factor of acute pancreatitis (AP). AP in coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) patients may be caused by direct attack of SARS-CoV-2 to pancreatic acinar cells or indirect, uncontrollable systemic inflammatory response from cytokine storm syndrome leading to multi-organ dysfunction including pancreatic injury or locoregional vasculitis and thrombotic microangiopathy from COVID-19. To our knowledge, there is no such comprehensive review with a detailed description of various articles on this topic including case reports and cohort studies.