S1239 Is There a Gender-Based Difference in the Prevalence of Gastrointestinal Symptoms in COVID-19? A Retrospective Cohort Study

INTRODUCTION: Since its discovery in Wuhan, China in December of 2019, the novel Coronavirus has progressed to become one of the worst pandemics seen in the last 100 years Recently the gastrointestinal manifestations of COVID-19 have been well documented We aimed to see if there is a gender-based difference in the prevalence of gastrointestinal symptoms in COVID-19 METHODS: This is a descriptive retrospective cohort study of 130 consecutive adult patients with a positive COVID PCR test admitted between March 16th, 2020 to May 14th, 2020 at a tertiary care university hospital We only included the inpatients and excluded those who tested COVID-19 positive but were not admitted to the hospital The Chi-square test was used for comparing categorical variables and analysis was done using SAS version 9 4 (SAS Institute, Cary, NC) RESULTS: Out of 130 patients, 59(45 4%) were female and 71 (55 6%) were male The most common gastrointestinal symptoms were diarrhea (26 2%) and anorexia (26 2%) followed by nausea (24 6%), abdominal pain (16 2%), and anosmia &/or ageusia (6 9%) The demographic of the study population is seen in Table 1 Women experienced significantly more anosmia and ageusia as compared to men (11 8% vs 2 8%, P = 0 04) There was no statistically significant difference in the presence of any other symptoms based on gender The gender-based difference is depicted in Table 2 CONCLUSION: Our study showed that anosmia&/or ageusia was more likely to be prevalent in women with COVID-19 as compared to men There was no gender predominance found when comparing other gastrointestinal symptoms Our study also showed that diarrhea and anorexia were the most common gastrointestinal symptoms which are in line with other studies (Table Presented)