Sources and clinical significance of aspartate aminotransferase increases in COVID-19.

"Declaration of Competing Interest The authors declare that they have no known competing financial interests or personal relationships that could have appeared to influence the work reported in this paper."

"We performed a retrospective, observational study on a cohort of adult (age ≥ 18 years old) COVID-19 patients admitted between February 2020 and February 2021 to the “Luigi Sacco” academic hospital in Milan, one of the two national reference centers for infectious diseases in Italy. All patients had clinical and/or radiologic findings highly suggestive for COVID-19 at admission and SARS-CoV-2 infection was confirmed by detection of viral RNA on nasopharyngeal material, using a real-time reverse transcription polymerase chain reaction method. Electronic records of all patients were reviewed, and those having at least one AST result during the hospitalization period were included in the study. The Institutional Review Board approved the study (registration no. 2020/ST/159)."