9 ms·

Testosterone, a key hormone in the context of Covid-19 pandemic

93 points by sebastianconcpt 6y ago

juskrey 6y ago
Let me summarize: good health protects from viruses.
- fenwick67 6y ago
  Better summary: "Who knows?"
- fortran77 6y ago
  And specifically, being at a heathy weight. It seems everyone's dancing around the elephant in the room, talking about "low testosterone" or "type II diabetes" as being co-morbidities. See: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3955331/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3955331/ for one of many sources for the link between obesity and low testosterone. Obesity just cost our nation several trillion dollars. People on Hacker News don't like to talk about this, either, because the Computer Programmer community is also affected by obesity.
  - vmception 6y ago
    I tell people that if they would be considered brave for being without a shirt at the beach, then they are an at risk population
    - rootusrootus 6y ago
      That's probably a little too inclusive. You can be healthy and still have a body nobody really cares to see shirtless.
      - falcor84 6y ago
        >a body nobody really cares to see shirtless As a European, I find this (apparently American) sentiment to be abhorrent. Our bodies shouldn't be treated as sculptures for the public to adore.
        rootusrootus 6y ago
        Pretty sure this is a worldwide thing. Including Europeans.
        LyndsySimon 6y ago
        It's certainly widespread, but it's not ubiquitous. I live smack in the center of the US, and visited Hawaii in ~2000. I remember being pleasantly surprised how little people cared about that sort of thing, and was far more comfortable on the beach there than anywhere else I've been. I was with a group of locals, not tourists, so I assume it's a cultural thing.
      - Cthulhu_ 6y ago
        Healthy or in shape? The terms are conflated too often for my liking. Same with food, low-calorie or low-fat / sugar foods are often labeled healthy, but IMO that lacks nuance. They are factually low-calorie for example. Whether they're healthy is another matter entirely because that depends largely on your overall diet.
      - blaser-waffle 6y ago
        I know a couple skinny chain smokers with alcohol problems. They go shirtless all the time -- southern VA, so that's how you do. No way they are healthy, and if they catch the COVID they're going to suffer; if they don't then I bet they're gonna get cancer by 55. I'm related to them and not hoping for those outcomes, but they ain't gonna change and we've just accepted it.
    - MarkusQ 6y ago
      > I tell people that if they would be considered brave for being without a shirt at the beach, then they are an at risk population. Yet it affects males more than females. Hmmm. When you say "people" do you mean "male people"? Or when you say "beaches" do you mean "topless beaches"?
      - dnate 6y ago
        Maybe he sees the female population at risk?
  - lazyjones 6y ago
    The lockdown might prevent some infections, but this sounds like it also potentially causes more severe outcomes due to less activity at home.
    - watwut 6y ago
      You control weight primary by food intake.
      - rootusrootus 6y ago
        And you control health primarily by activity.
      - stirbot 6y ago
        If you're already overweight you should combine control of calorie intake with exercise. The only way fat leaves the body (besides surgery) is by exhaling it as CO2
        kube-system 6y ago
        It is definitely good to exercise when attempting to lose weight, but I don't think the reason is not because it significantly changes the amount you breathe. If you exercise for 30 minutes you'll breathe about 4% more breaths that day.
        kerkeslager 6y ago
        True, but you're always exhaling CO2, even when you're not exercising. Exercise simply doesn't create a very large increase the amount of calories you burn. Consider: a person at my height/weight burns approximately 2500 calories/day just by resting metabolic rate. According to this calculator[1], a person of my weight running a mile at an 8 minute pace burns 136 calories. In other words, running a 5k every day would only increase my calories burned by 17%. And running 8 minute miles is one of the more efficient ways to burn calories--if you're doing some other exercise, your calories burned are likely much lower. Compare the effort involved in running a 5k with drinking two less cans of cola (about equivalent in calories) and you'll quickly see how diet has a much larger effect on weight loss than exercise. There's a reason they say abs are made in the kitchen not in the gym. [1] https://www.runnersworld.com/training/a20801301/calories-burned-running-calculator/ https://www.runnersworld.com/training/a20801301/calories-bur...
  - pastrami_panda 6y ago
    Wonder what the net loss is though, considering the vast amounts of money the process of getting a nation so obese has put into the economy. I don't mean to be calloused though, this is truly a horrible situation, and I do feel empathic towards people that are unable to take care of their body.
- vmception 6y ago
  tl;dr knowing specifically which part of good health steers public policy decisions
  - juskrey 6y ago
    Like that "part of good health" really exists, right?
- SketchySeaBeast 6y ago
  I see in the article "It is well established that plasma testosterone concentration is reduced by age and comorbidities like obesity, diabetes and obstructive sleep apnea (OSA) [7], all comorbidities highly prevalent in COVID-19 patients." but I never see any discussion of people who are without those comorbidities. I know they are asking for more research to be done, but at this point, and unless there's evidence presented to the contrary, I think it's probably safe to assume it's general unhealthiness.
- elric 6y ago
  > good health protects from viruses Does it? Good health may increase the odds of a good outcome for some viral infection, but it's a bit of a platitude in general. The reasons why measles, polio or HIV are so dangerous is not because of the poor health of their victims prior to infection.
- belorn 6y ago
  That is not the takeaway I get from the paper. I read it as establishing that because testosterone levels has an well established impact on muscles growth, low testosterone should thus impact respiratory muscles size at the point of getting the infection which in turn impact outcomes for people with respiratory disease. However this logic also imply that men should have an overall better outcome to respiratory disease than women, as men has on average more and larger muscles than women, but research into this tend to be more complex than that. Low testosterone has also been linked in research with increased inflammation response. One of the causes for deadly outcomes of Covid-19 is an over inflammatory response, thus the paper argue there could be a link between low testosterone levels and increase mortality for Covid-19 patients. The paper also mention a potential risk for people with high testosterone levels because a related gene which biological function of is unknown but which is connected to the function of prostate cancer cells. There seems to be indications that this gene can also modulate covid-19, and if we would inhibit the gene the theory is that it may reduce the effect of the virus. Clinic studies will have to show if it helps, do nothing or makes things worse, because right now its just a theory based on a gene which from my reading we don't know much about.
mister_hn 6y ago
If it's a key hormone, why Covid19 seems to attack especially men?
- eloff 6y ago
  Just thinking aloud here, but maybe not because testosterone is bad in this case, but because estrogen is protective. I've heard, but I don't have a source, that women fair better than men in many health aspects right up to menopause and then it reverses. If anyone knows of a citation for or against that I'd love a link.
- joemazerino 6y ago
  Because men in 2020 have statistically lower testosterone than men decades before them.
  - rodiger 6y ago
    Source on that? Or just a quip about a lack of perceived "toughness"? Edit: Wow looks like it's true, TIL!
    - erfgh 6y ago
      https://www.forbes.com/sites/neilhowe/2017/10/02/youre-not-the-man-your-father-was/ https://www.forbes.com/sites/neilhowe/2017/10/02/youre-not-t... or https://archive.is/cVyND https://archive.is/cVyND
      - gowld 6y ago
        That article starts off with interesting science (T dropping 50% in a century, T possibly boosted for a generation by cigarettes, etc) and then takes a weird turn at Tyler Cowen and meanders into speculative woods.
        excursionist 6y ago
        Do you have a source for 'cigarettes boost T'? Is it the nicotine or some other chemical in cigarettes?
temptemptemp111 6y ago
Judging by comments, the majority of HN readers have very low testosterone.
acqq 6y ago
The real summary of it is just: "Is low testosterone a promoter of COVID-19 infection? Is high testosterone a promoter of COVID-19 infection? The elucidation of the role of testosterone in the battle towards COVID-19 infection turns out to be an urgent need. " But the answer can still be neither-nor in spite of the fact that "difference in the number of cases reported by gender increases progressively in favor of male subjects."
Infinitesimus 6y ago
Attempt at a simple summary: From what I see, low testosterone is a risk because there is a strong link between lower respiratory muscle activity and lower testosterone levels and high testosterone is a risk because high test -> more androgen receptor expressions -> more binding opportunities for TMPRSS2 and that gene seems to be an active factor in transcription of covid-19. Its not a magic bullet but the TMPRSS2 angle is quite interesting since we could target drugs that temporarily minimize androgen receptor affectiveness to control the spread ( which might complicate other things in the meantime..) Tangent, what's the state of drug discovery when it comes to simulating interactions of hormonal treatments with cells?
- blahbhthrow3748 6y ago
  Looking forward to the cyproterone shortages after people start trying to suppress testosterone to avoid catching covid.
- sandworm101 6y ago
  >> we could target drugs that temporarily minimize androgen receptor affectiveness to control the spread Modifying key hormone functionality across the population, what could possibly go wrong? The impact on other diseases, not to mention behavior, is huge open question.
  - strofcon 6y ago
    Presumably this would only be done for those found to be at risk based on tested testosterone levels. Fortunately the linked paper doesn't recommend it, only notes the stats and details and concludes that "The elucidation of the role of testosterone in the battle towards COVID-19 infection turns out to be an urgent need." Seems pretty even-handed to me.
    - sandworm101 6y ago
      That's the difference between treating patients and reducing spread. Appling a preventative to a small population of at-risk individuals will help them individually but won't decrease spread with the population, won't decrease their exposure. That requires preventing the infection from spreading amongst all people, including those who are at no real risk. This is one of those special situations where one contemplates a applying treatment to patients A B and C not to protect them from harm but to protect them from spreading something to patients D and E. The ethical difficulty is how one balances the potential increased in risks to ABC against the benifits to DE. What if hormone therapy to ABC reduces their lifespan? What it if causes long term behavioral or repoductive changes? How should that be balanced against D and E's chances of infection/death? Remember that any widespread COVID therapy will likely be with us as long as the disease. Altering hormone levels across a population, potentially for many years or even decades, is a radical approach. And to think of altering testosterone amongst the reproductive-aged population, potentially modifying sexual development of exposed children too, to safeguard those beyond reproductive age from COVID? That's a very dangrous area.
kerkeslager 6y ago
This isn't a study, it's a summary of reasons why testosterone might be related (positively OR negatively) to Covid19 outcomes in males. The intent seems to be to solicit funding for actual studies. I really don't see much reason to be linking papers which are this early in the scientific process here. It just creates confusion. HN readers often don't read the links completely or at all, and are prone to overestimate how conclusive papers are. At the time I'm writing this, literally every single comment on this thread is misunderstanding what this paper is.
- Cthulhu_ 6y ago
  If you think HN commenters are bad, wait until the media gets wind of this, strips all nuance and goes "ALL MEN ARE GOING TO FUCKING DIE OF THE RONA" or a variation thereof.
  - Spooky23 6y ago
    And some influencer will read “RONA” as “RONI” and start picketing of pizza shops as pepperoni is killing us.
    - blaser-waffle 6y ago
      Given the rates of obesity and it's effect on people, they should. Obesity also has a weak correlation to COVID mortality, though like all of the other studies coming out it's hard to say if that's a direct relation or if it's something that correlates with other vulnerabilities.
  - walterbell 6y ago
    Have you looked at the male/female stats?
    - kerkeslager 6y ago
      Yes. So? That doesn't prove anything to do with testosterone. There are at least a dozen other possible reasons that men might have higher infection rates and worse outcomes than women, which have nothing to do with testosterone. And just to be clear, the paper doesn't say that testosterone his associated with worse Covid19 outcomes.
TheSockStealer 6y ago
I can see this information playing into some troubling right-wing tropes about masculinity. Basically, if you are an Alpha (High T) you won't get sick, but if you are a weak Beta (Low T) you will. Therefore, if you get sick from Covid and you are a man, you are weak and somehow deserve it. I hope this does not play out like this and everyone is rational and compassionate, but I doubt it.
- lobotryas 6y ago
  Alpha vs Beta (as far as that concept is useful) is a question of behavior, attitude, and being able to love yourself; not T levels. Your comment betrays that you have a very shallow understanding of these topics. I encourage you to do some reading on this from first sources to get an understanding of the topic.
  - mattbk1 6y ago
    In the spirit of good faith, I think the comment was explaining the (incorrect) tropes, not supporting these ideas as fact.
    - TheSockStealer 6y ago
      Exactly
  - TheSockStealer 6y ago
    I am not saying that I believe or agree with any of this just that I can see this valid research being twisted to fit a very toxic narrative that already exists.
purple_ferret 6y ago
The question is: should men after a certain age supplement with testosterone injections?
gingerbread-man 6y ago
Speaking only for myself, I found this article to be particularly difficult to comprehend. If there are any physicians or molecular biologists who could more plainly summarize the authors' conclusions, I would greatly appreciate it. From what I can gather: — SARS-CoV-2 uses ACE2 in the alveolar epithelium as an entry receptor. ACE2 may also be involved in regulating cytokine activity and in viral replication. — "Pro-inflammatory cytokines have a central role in the progression of COVID-19 infection." — Anti-cytokine therapy may help reduce pulmonary inflammation in C19 patients. — ACE2 is also present in the leydig (testosterone producing) cells of male rats. — Long-term smokers express higher levels of ACE2 in their lungs. COPD patients are more likely to have low testosterone levels. And low testosterone has been linked to increased Pro-inflammatory cytokine activity. ——> Maybe testosterone reduces inflammation and, by extension, mortality, in COVID-19 patients? (I still do not really understand how the production of ACE2 in the leydig cells is related to this.) Or, on the high-testostetone side: — Androgen receptors activate the transcription of TMPRSS2, a transmembrane serine protease found primarily in prostate epithelium. — "TMPRSS2 activity is regarded as essential for viral spread and pathogenesis in the infected hosts." ——> Elevated testosterone in some young men may increase TMPRSS2 activation, and be a common cause in the relatively small number of severe cases in that age group.

juskrey 6y ago

Let me summarize: good health protects from viruses.

fenwick67 6y ago
Better summary: "Who knows?"
fortran77 6y ago
And specifically, being at a heathy weight. It seems everyone's dancing around the elephant in the room, talking about "low testosterone" or "type II diabetes" as being co-morbidities. See: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3955331/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3955331/ for one of many sources for the link between obesity and low testosterone. Obesity just cost our nation several trillion dollars. People on Hacker News don't like to talk about this, either, because the Computer Programmer community is also affected by obesity.
- vmception 6y ago
  I tell people that if they would be considered brave for being without a shirt at the beach, then they are an at risk population
  - rootusrootus 6y ago
    That's probably a little too inclusive. You can be healthy and still have a body nobody really cares to see shirtless.
    - falcor84 6y ago
      >a body nobody really cares to see shirtless As a European, I find this (apparently American) sentiment to be abhorrent. Our bodies shouldn't be treated as sculptures for the public to adore.
      - rootusrootus 6y ago
        Pretty sure this is a worldwide thing. Including Europeans.
        LyndsySimon 6y ago
        It's certainly widespread, but it's not ubiquitous. I live smack in the center of the US, and visited Hawaii in ~2000. I remember being pleasantly surprised how little people cared about that sort of thing, and was far more comfortable on the beach there than anywhere else I've been. I was with a group of locals, not tourists, so I assume it's a cultural thing.
    - Cthulhu_ 6y ago
      Healthy or in shape? The terms are conflated too often for my liking. Same with food, low-calorie or low-fat / sugar foods are often labeled healthy, but IMO that lacks nuance. They are factually low-calorie for example. Whether they're healthy is another matter entirely because that depends largely on your overall diet.
    - blaser-waffle 6y ago
      I know a couple skinny chain smokers with alcohol problems. They go shirtless all the time -- southern VA, so that's how you do. No way they are healthy, and if they catch the COVID they're going to suffer; if they don't then I bet they're gonna get cancer by 55. I'm related to them and not hoping for those outcomes, but they ain't gonna change and we've just accepted it.
  - MarkusQ 6y ago
    > I tell people that if they would be considered brave for being without a shirt at the beach, then they are an at risk population. Yet it affects males more than females. Hmmm. When you say "people" do you mean "male people"? Or when you say "beaches" do you mean "topless beaches"?
    - dnate 6y ago
      Maybe he sees the female population at risk?
- lazyjones 6y ago
  The lockdown might prevent some infections, but this sounds like it also potentially causes more severe outcomes due to less activity at home.
  - watwut 6y ago
    You control weight primary by food intake.
    - rootusrootus 6y ago
      And you control health primarily by activity.
    - stirbot 6y ago
      If you're already overweight you should combine control of calorie intake with exercise. The only way fat leaves the body (besides surgery) is by exhaling it as CO2
      - kube-system 6y ago
        It is definitely good to exercise when attempting to lose weight, but I don't think the reason is not because it significantly changes the amount you breathe. If you exercise for 30 minutes you'll breathe about 4% more breaths that day.
      - kerkeslager 6y ago
        True, but you're always exhaling CO2, even when you're not exercising. Exercise simply doesn't create a very large increase the amount of calories you burn. Consider: a person at my height/weight burns approximately 2500 calories/day just by resting metabolic rate. According to this calculator[1], a person of my weight running a mile at an 8 minute pace burns 136 calories. In other words, running a 5k every day would only increase my calories burned by 17%. And running 8 minute miles is one of the more efficient ways to burn calories--if you're doing some other exercise, your calories burned are likely much lower. Compare the effort involved in running a 5k with drinking two less cans of cola (about equivalent in calories) and you'll quickly see how diet has a much larger effect on weight loss than exercise. There's a reason they say abs are made in the kitchen not in the gym. [1] https://www.runnersworld.com/training/a20801301/calories-burned-running-calculator/ https://www.runnersworld.com/training/a20801301/calories-bur...
- pastrami_panda 6y ago
  Wonder what the net loss is though, considering the vast amounts of money the process of getting a nation so obese has put into the economy. I don't mean to be calloused though, this is truly a horrible situation, and I do feel empathic towards people that are unable to take care of their body.
vmception 6y ago
tl;dr knowing specifically which part of good health steers public policy decisions
- juskrey 6y ago
  Like that "part of good health" really exists, right?
SketchySeaBeast 6y ago
I see in the article "It is well established that plasma testosterone concentration is reduced by age and comorbidities like obesity, diabetes and obstructive sleep apnea (OSA) [7], all comorbidities highly prevalent in COVID-19 patients." but I never see any discussion of people who are without those comorbidities. I know they are asking for more research to be done, but at this point, and unless there's evidence presented to the contrary, I think it's probably safe to assume it's general unhealthiness.
elric 6y ago
> good health protects from viruses Does it? Good health may increase the odds of a good outcome for some viral infection, but it's a bit of a platitude in general. The reasons why measles, polio or HIV are so dangerous is not because of the poor health of their victims prior to infection.
belorn 6y ago
That is not the takeaway I get from the paper. I read it as establishing that because testosterone levels has an well established impact on muscles growth, low testosterone should thus impact respiratory muscles size at the point of getting the infection which in turn impact outcomes for people with respiratory disease. However this logic also imply that men should have an overall better outcome to respiratory disease than women, as men has on average more and larger muscles than women, but research into this tend to be more complex than that. Low testosterone has also been linked in research with increased inflammation response. One of the causes for deadly outcomes of Covid-19 is an over inflammatory response, thus the paper argue there could be a link between low testosterone levels and increase mortality for Covid-19 patients. The paper also mention a potential risk for people with high testosterone levels because a related gene which biological function of is unknown but which is connected to the function of prostate cancer cells. There seems to be indications that this gene can also modulate covid-19, and if we would inhibit the gene the theory is that it may reduce the effect of the virus. Clinic studies will have to show if it helps, do nothing or makes things worse, because right now its just a theory based on a gene which from my reading we don't know much about.

mister_hn 6y ago

If it's a key hormone, why Covid19 seems to attack especially men?

eloff 6y ago
Just thinking aloud here, but maybe not because testosterone is bad in this case, but because estrogen is protective. I've heard, but I don't have a source, that women fair better than men in many health aspects right up to menopause and then it reverses. If anyone knows of a citation for or against that I'd love a link.
joemazerino 6y ago
Because men in 2020 have statistically lower testosterone than men decades before them.
- rodiger 6y ago
  Source on that? Or just a quip about a lack of perceived "toughness"? Edit: Wow looks like it's true, TIL!
  - erfgh 6y ago
    https://www.forbes.com/sites/neilhowe/2017/10/02/youre-not-the-man-your-father-was/ https://www.forbes.com/sites/neilhowe/2017/10/02/youre-not-t... or https://archive.is/cVyND https://archive.is/cVyND
    - gowld 6y ago
      That article starts off with interesting science (T dropping 50% in a century, T possibly boosted for a generation by cigarettes, etc) and then takes a weird turn at Tyler Cowen and meanders into speculative woods.
      - excursionist 6y ago
        Do you have a source for 'cigarettes boost T'? Is it the nicotine or some other chemical in cigarettes?

temptemptemp111 6y ago

Judging by comments, the majority of HN readers have very low testosterone.

acqq 6y ago

The real summary of it is just: "Is low testosterone a promoter of COVID-19 infection? Is high testosterone a promoter of COVID-19 infection? The elucidation of the role of testosterone in the battle towards COVID-19 infection turns out to be an urgent need. " But the answer can still be neither-nor in spite of the fact that "difference in the number of cases reported by gender increases progressively in favor of male subjects."

Infinitesimus 6y ago

Attempt at a simple summary: From what I see, low testosterone is a risk because there is a strong link between lower respiratory muscle activity and lower testosterone levels and high testosterone is a risk because high test -> more androgen receptor expressions -> more binding opportunities for TMPRSS2 and that gene seems to be an active factor in transcription of covid-19. Its not a magic bullet but the TMPRSS2 angle is quite interesting since we could target drugs that temporarily minimize androgen receptor affectiveness to control the spread ( which might complicate other things in the meantime..) Tangent, what's the state of drug discovery when it comes to simulating interactions of hormonal treatments with cells?

blahbhthrow3748 6y ago
Looking forward to the cyproterone shortages after people start trying to suppress testosterone to avoid catching covid.
sandworm101 6y ago
>> we could target drugs that temporarily minimize androgen receptor affectiveness to control the spread Modifying key hormone functionality across the population, what could possibly go wrong? The impact on other diseases, not to mention behavior, is huge open question.
- strofcon 6y ago
  Presumably this would only be done for those found to be at risk based on tested testosterone levels. Fortunately the linked paper doesn't recommend it, only notes the stats and details and concludes that "The elucidation of the role of testosterone in the battle towards COVID-19 infection turns out to be an urgent need." Seems pretty even-handed to me.
  - sandworm101 6y ago
    That's the difference between treating patients and reducing spread. Appling a preventative to a small population of at-risk individuals will help them individually but won't decrease spread with the population, won't decrease their exposure. That requires preventing the infection from spreading amongst all people, including those who are at no real risk. This is one of those special situations where one contemplates a applying treatment to patients A B and C not to protect them from harm but to protect them from spreading something to patients D and E. The ethical difficulty is how one balances the potential increased in risks to ABC against the benifits to DE. What if hormone therapy to ABC reduces their lifespan? What it if causes long term behavioral or repoductive changes? How should that be balanced against D and E's chances of infection/death? Remember that any widespread COVID therapy will likely be with us as long as the disease. Altering hormone levels across a population, potentially for many years or even decades, is a radical approach. And to think of altering testosterone amongst the reproductive-aged population, potentially modifying sexual development of exposed children too, to safeguard those beyond reproductive age from COVID? That's a very dangrous area.

kerkeslager 6y ago

This isn't a study, it's a summary of reasons why testosterone might be related (positively OR negatively) to Covid19 outcomes in males. The intent seems to be to solicit funding for actual studies. I really don't see much reason to be linking papers which are this early in the scientific process here. It just creates confusion. HN readers often don't read the links completely or at all, and are prone to overestimate how conclusive papers are. At the time I'm writing this, literally every single comment on this thread is misunderstanding what this paper is.

Cthulhu_ 6y ago
If you think HN commenters are bad, wait until the media gets wind of this, strips all nuance and goes "ALL MEN ARE GOING TO FUCKING DIE OF THE RONA" or a variation thereof.
- Spooky23 6y ago
  And some influencer will read “RONA” as “RONI” and start picketing of pizza shops as pepperoni is killing us.
  - blaser-waffle 6y ago
    Given the rates of obesity and it's effect on people, they should. Obesity also has a weak correlation to COVID mortality, though like all of the other studies coming out it's hard to say if that's a direct relation or if it's something that correlates with other vulnerabilities.
- walterbell 6y ago
  Have you looked at the male/female stats?
  - kerkeslager 6y ago
    Yes. So? That doesn't prove anything to do with testosterone. There are at least a dozen other possible reasons that men might have higher infection rates and worse outcomes than women, which have nothing to do with testosterone. And just to be clear, the paper doesn't say that testosterone his associated with worse Covid19 outcomes.

TheSockStealer 6y ago

I can see this information playing into some troubling right-wing tropes about masculinity. Basically, if you are an Alpha (High T) you won't get sick, but if you are a weak Beta (Low T) you will. Therefore, if you get sick from Covid and you are a man, you are weak and somehow deserve it. I hope this does not play out like this and everyone is rational and compassionate, but I doubt it.

lobotryas 6y ago
Alpha vs Beta (as far as that concept is useful) is a question of behavior, attitude, and being able to love yourself; not T levels. Your comment betrays that you have a very shallow understanding of these topics. I encourage you to do some reading on this from first sources to get an understanding of the topic.
- mattbk1 6y ago
  In the spirit of good faith, I think the comment was explaining the (incorrect) tropes, not supporting these ideas as fact.
  - TheSockStealer 6y ago
    Exactly
- TheSockStealer 6y ago
  I am not saying that I believe or agree with any of this just that I can see this valid research being twisted to fit a very toxic narrative that already exists.

purple_ferret 6y ago

The question is: should men after a certain age supplement with testosterone injections?

gingerbread-man 6y ago

Speaking only for myself, I found this article to be particularly difficult to comprehend. If there are any physicians or molecular biologists who could more plainly summarize the authors' conclusions, I would greatly appreciate it. From what I can gather: — SARS-CoV-2 uses ACE2 in the alveolar epithelium as an entry receptor. ACE2 may also be involved in regulating cytokine activity and in viral replication. — "Pro-inflammatory cytokines have a central role in the progression of COVID-19 infection." — Anti-cytokine therapy may help reduce pulmonary inflammation in C19 patients. — ACE2 is also present in the leydig (testosterone producing) cells of male rats. — Long-term smokers express higher levels of ACE2 in their lungs. COPD patients are more likely to have low testosterone levels. And low testosterone has been linked to increased Pro-inflammatory cytokine activity. ——> Maybe testosterone reduces inflammation and, by extension, mortality, in COVID-19 patients? (I still do not really understand how the production of ACE2 in the leydig cells is related to this.) Or, on the high-testostetone side: — Androgen receptors activate the transcription of TMPRSS2, a transmembrane serine protease found primarily in prostate epithelium. — "TMPRSS2 activity is regarded as essential for viral spread and pathogenesis in the infected hosts." ——> Elevated testosterone in some young men may increase TMPRSS2 activation, and be a common cause in the relatively small number of severe cases in that age group.