Clinical profile, outcome and management of kidney disease in COVID-19 patients - a narrative review.

OBJECTIVE

COVID-19 disease can cause damage to various organs, especially the kidneys, so the main purpose of this study was to investigate the effect of different aspects of kidney damages caused by COVID-19 in a narrative review study.

MATERIALS AND METHODS

To conduct this study, all studies related to the topic under discussion during 2020-2021 were reviewed by systematic search in internationally available databases including Web of Science, Science Direct, Scopus, PubMed, and Google Scholar. Finally, 42 completely related studies were selected to extract the results.

RESULTS

The prevalence of acute kidney injury (AKI) varies in different parts of the world and has reached almost 70%. The results showed that, in general, a high percentage of COVID-19 patients had symptoms of renal dysfunction at the time of hospitalization, and the most important of these symptoms were proteinuria, hematuria, and increased serum creatinine. Based on the results, it can be said that AKI most likely occurs early in the disease and in parallel with lung damage. So far, various drugs have been used to control or treat COVID-19 and reduce inflammation in patients. Regardless of their usefulness, some of these drugs may adversely affect kidney function and damage the kidneys. The study results show that chronic kidney disease (CKD) in COVID-19 patients plays a minor role in renal replacement therapy (RRT), and the highest impact on the need for RRT is COVID-19.

CONCLUSIONS

This study showed that one of the major negative effects of COVID-19 on the human body is kidney damage, among which acute kidney injury (AKI) is the most important one. In addition, the prevalence of AKI due to COVID-19 varies widely around the world. Although any medication may damage the kidneys, COVID-19 or anti-inflammatory drugs are not an exception to this rule, but more research is needed to gain more information.