SARS CoV 2 May Not Aggravate Liver Injury in Patients with Hepatitis B Virus Infection

COVID-19 has become a global pandemic and garnered international attention. Although the clinical features of COVID-19 related liver injury have been investigated, there have been no reports and studies on the clinical characteristics of COVID-19 patients co-infected with Hepatitis B Virus (HBV). This study was aimed to evaluate whether SARS-CoV-2/HBV co-infection could influence liver function and the disease outcome. All 326 confirmed COVID-19 cases in Shanghai Public Health Clinical Center (The COVID-19 designated hospital in Shanghai, China) from January 20, 2020 to February 24, 2020 were enrolled and followed up until February 29 in this study. The clinical, laboratory data and the length of stay were collected and analyzed retrospectively. 20 patients with HBV co-infection (6.1%) and 306 patients (93.9%) without HBV infection showed no differences in the level of liver function parameters. However, compared with HBsAg- patients [145.4 mg/L (103.9-179.2)], HBsAg+ patients had a lower level of prealbumin [(102.3 mg/L (76.22-160.2), P=.0367]. There were also no significant differences for the discharge rate and the length of stay between two groups. Our study is the first to elaborate on the clinical characteristics of SARS-CoV-2/HBV co-infection patients and no evidence shows SARS-CoV-2/HBV co-infection could aggravate liver injury or extend hospitalization time. Funding Statement: This study was funded by the first-class discipline construction project of Fudan university (ISF162005),Shanghai Science and Technology Development Fund (No.17411969500), National Science and Technology Major Project (2017ZX10203202-003-007) and Shanghai Public Health Clinical Center Fund (2020YJKY01, XKJS-2019HBV-06, KY-GW-2019-32) joined in hepatitis prevention and control procedures. Declaration of Interests: All authors declare that they have no competing interests. Ethics Approval Statement: This study was approved by the Ethics Committee of the Shanghai Public Health Clinical Center (2019-S047-02, Review date: Jan 13, 2020) and was exempted from the need for informed consent from patients.