10 ms·
Significant sex differences in Covid-19 immune response
- timr 6y agoHere is the actual paper. Drives me nuts when university PR departments can't be bothered to link to the source literature: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-020-2700-3 https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-020-2700-3
- Wohlf 6y agoSeems like they factored in the obvious stuff, i.e. men having poorer health outcomes in general, so I wonder if this has something to do with reproduction? By that I mean women's immune systems reacting more strongly to protect a (possible) baby?
- dleslie 6y agoOr perhaps men produce more mucous in their respiratory system, in general?
- criddell 6y agoIs that why professional baseball players can't go more than 45 seconds without spitting?
- nitrogen 6y agoThat's probably tobacco, or at least was stereotyped as such historically.
- kube-system 6y agohttps://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/15735297/ https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/15735297/
- criddell 6y agoI think you're right. A bunch of ball parks are now tobacco free so it's no longer the case. It's funny - when you watch the little league world series, the kids spit too.
- bregma 6y agoNot to mention scratching their groins. Some kind of immune response is involved in that, I'm sure. No need for the free clinic to get it cured when you're paid as much as an MLB player.
- BurningFrog 6y agoOnly men get called "slimeballs"!
- est31 6y agoYeah there are sex differences in the immune system in general. For example, women get stronger immunity from vaccinations but also have more problems with autoimmune diseases. https://doi.org/10.1007/s00281-018-00728-x https://doi.org/10.1007/s00281-018-00728-x
- timr 6y agoYeah, I was most concerned about controlling for BMI, since ~all of the prior evidence for sex differences didn't/couldn't do it. They controlled for BMI in cohort A, and performed an adjusted analysis in cohort B, so I'm somewhat satisfied on that front.
- microcolonel 6y agoBMI isn't exactly comparable between the sexes, since males and females have different distributions of adipose and visceral fat, and the impacts of these are clearly different.
- timr 6y agoThose kinds of effects would presumably count as "gender-specific differences". Previous investigations never really took body mass into account at all, which was...bad.
- rsynnott 6y agoAnd that could maybe contribute to something. There were other studies, though, which didn't take BMI into account at all, even though high BMI is a known risk factor, and generally more men are obese than women.
- pkaye 6y agoI saw this study from southern California. They provide risk ratios for different factors. Seems just being male have a higher risk ratio than being overweight. https://www.acpjournals.org/doi/10.7326/M20-3742#f1-M203742 https://www.acpjournals.org/doi/10.7326/M20-3742#f1-M203742
- taeric 6y agoMy pet idea that I would be interested in ways to test ultimately links back to what shared restrooms for men look like. Since they have made such a big show of how much we can detect this in wastewater, I am curious if standing urinals and such contribute to higher spread. Would amusingly fit in with many of the "why aren't crowds getting this?" It is largely crowded places with large communal restrooms that have associated outbreaks.
- engineer_22 6y agoPardon me, but most men aren't splashing around in the urinals. If you're really curious what it looks like you could just go in one and have a look around... :)
- taeric 6y agoI'm not accusing us of literally stepping into the urinal. I thought the data was fairly clear that men are worse at washing their hands than women are. And it seems a safe claim that splash back from the urinal is not zero. That said, I'm calling this my pet idea, in large because I think it is a silly one. Do I think it is in the realm of plausible? I mean, yeah. But I don't think it has stepped into the realm of likely.
- foobarian 6y agoForget washing hands, the urinals are very close to each other and there are no barriers to exhaled air. Someone sneezes, it bounces off the wall to the adjacent users.
- rasengan 6y agoMen’s immune systems weaken with increased testosterone - speculation is that this allows them to have less immune response so they can keep hunting and fighting.
- kapilkaisare 6y agoHow does an immune response impact physical capability?
- ti00 6y agoA fever is the result of an immune response.
- throwaway43234 6y agoMost of "feeling sick" isn't the actual bacteria/virus causing problems, it's your immune system doing things like raising your internal temperature to fight off the virus or generating boatloads of phlegm to do whatever that does.
- jxramos 6y agoInteresting; when my wife and I both get sick we always note this recurring theme where I get this intense but brief bout of illness, and her's are more drawn out and prolonged but significantly less intense. Timewise we're talking about 1-3 day sickness for me and 1-2wk sickness on her end. That recurring observation has caused a bunch of speculation between us about evolutionary protections and stuff where perhaps the man being down has more immediate risks that can threaten the family in the protecting role or something like that. Not sure entirely but fun to imagine about.
- kube-system 6y agoI thought the issue was the other way around in this case -- people were having bad results from COVID due to too severe of an immune response.
- csboyer 6y agoAs far as I know, pregnancy suppresses the immune response in order to keep the body from attacking the baby itself. That’s why doctors recommend pregnant women not to eat under cooked eggs, sushi and other high risk food items. Flu shots are also heavily encouraged for the same reason - the flu is a lot tougher to beat.
- dududuuehe 6y agoDon't say it too loudly, you'll get called transphobic.
- tureen 6y agoSex change, problem solved.
- perardi 6y agoThere’s a lot of literature about sex hormones and immune response. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6119719/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6119719/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4701921/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4701921/ And then extremely anecdotally: the only people I personally know who have gotten sick† in my ~25–35-year-old social circle have been guys who are, as they say, “on the bike”. Geared up, if you know what I mean. †and they’ve all recovered well; they had about a week of pretty nasty flu-like symptoms, but then bounced back with bed rest
- newsbinator 6y agoI wonder if guys who are taking steroids are also guys who are less careful about social distancing, and perhaps they are people who go to a public gym or work out in groups in private ones.
- perardi 6y agoA very reasonable line of questioning. Especially since at least one of them was at this early super-spreader event: https://www.miamiherald.com/news/coronavirus/article241941651.html https://www.miamiherald.com/news/coronavirus/article24194165...
- rsynnott 6y agoYou'd almost expect this; taking steroids, particularly without medical supervision, is inherently rather dangerous, so it's fairly reasonable to assume that people who do it are on average more reckless than normal people.
- newsbinator 6y agoThe next question: what's the incidence of Covid among base jumpers and cave divers?
- rsynnott 6y agoYou might expect some difference, but I think people who take steroids for recreational or cosmetic purposes or to cheat at sports are a bit different; base jumpers would generally know and accept that base jumping is dangerous, but do it because they enjoy it, whereas steroid abusers are often self-deluding; they don't acknowledge that it's dangerous at all.
- 0134340 6y agoRead it but it left me curious how it may affect intersex people like XXY and found a better article [0]. So tldr, apparently number of X chromosomes affects cytokine production. "The lower secretion of inflammatory cytokines in women may protect them from an uncontrolled and potentially life-threatening immune response in cases of severe aggression such as sepsis, trauma or extensive burns throughout life." [0]: https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fimmu.2019.01052/full https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fimmu.2019.0105...
- connicpu 6y agoIt seems much more likely that the direct controller is sex hormone levels, not chromosomes. Though chromosomes may affect what levels of sex hormones your body produces naturally, hormones are what actually control dimorphism in the immune system[0] [0]: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4251360/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4251360/
- sascha_sl 6y agoQuite an important distinction for trans and lots of intersex people (particularly those with receptor insensitivities), though I have not seen anything conclusive supporting one or the other, and usually the research into what is considered edge cases is unfortunately very limited :/
- dogma1138 6y agoWouldn’t that make young males more susceptible if testosterone induces a more severe immune response?
- belorn 6y agoHigher innate immune cytokines in female patients was associated with worse disease progression, but not in male patients. This seem to indicate that the level of sex hormones for men is less relevant for cytokines, or at least those involved with covid-19 immune response.
- zkms 6y ago
- just-juan-post 6y agoSo it's like the flu? https://www.health.harvard.edu/blog/man-flu-really-thing-2018010413033 https://www.health.harvard.edu/blog/man-flu-really-thing-201... Have we as an Internet decided to accept this fact now? I remember just a few shorts months ago if you brought up this idea you would get downvoted, banned, and mocked with sarcastic cries of "IT'S ONLY THE FLU BRO". Are we finally accepting that Covid is just another variation of the flu and not the humanity-ender that some vocal online folks (and power hungry governors) think it is?
- rsynnott 6y ago> Are we finally accepting that Covid is just another variation of the flu Oh, FFS. "Flu" is influenza, caused by an influenza virus. COVID-19 is caused by a coronavirus; if you wanted to make glib comparisons to anything you'd probably be better off calling it a really bad common cold. A strain of flu that was both as infectious and as lethal as covid would, indeed, be very, very bad, and public health authorities have long been worried about such a thing showing up again.
- stickydink 6y agoI have never known anybody that died of the flu. I personally know of 4 people (in 2 different countries) - family, friends, or family of friends, who have died from Covid. None were over 60. I don't know that many people. This is not the same, stop believing this garbage.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- codezero 6y ago(Just realized my comment is replying to you, but I think a bulk of it is directed at the GP - just wanted to clarify) Covid is real and I don’t think the numbers lie, but I also think we’re at an unprecedented level of measurement and quantification and it does make me wonder - folks I know who’ve died of pneumonia in old age probably didn’t get “influenza” as a cause of death in recent years even if it was what ultimately kicked off the over all failure of their organs. There are whole classes of causes of death that just lack data/information to know the set of causes and to correctly attribute them to the mortality. Anyhow, I’m seeing this as a huge global experiment to quantify a novel virus, and for that reason it’s interesting and exciting while also terrifying and bad. What I mean by that is, we’re in the middle of the storm, it doesn’t really make sense to compare this to something yet, it’s not over, and not even close to understood, so let’s just treat it with the same caution we’d treat any other uncontrollable global plague until we know better, with extreme caution and suspicion, and we should assume it could kill us all eventually. We’ve never successfully made a coronavirus vaccine. Think about that. Read up on the previous trials - a successful vaccine still brings a lot of scary things, like, what it does in the wild if another novel coronavirus shows up, or the potential for it to turn a mutation into a more lethal or more viral strain. So yeah, let’s hunker down and hold on until we have this collectively under control and we can START to understand what’s going on.
- blargmaster33 6y agoBut sex is just a social construct you bigots!
- aeturnum 6y agoI see the "but I thought sex was a construct" folks are showing up at the bottom of the thread. I suspect the gender radicals would be quite happy with this study if they just replaced male and female with AMAB and AFAB[1]. I actually think followup studies on gender minorities could be really interesting here - do people taking testosterone get sick like AMAB people who aren't taking hormones? Do AMAB people taking estrogen have better outcomes? [1] Assigned male at birth and assigned female at birth, respectively.
- jnwatson 6y agoGender is a social construct. Sex is a matter of biology. Those aren't the same thing.
- aeturnum 6y agoI agree they aren't the same thing, but I would say that both sex and gender are impacted by biology so I'm not sure that's a useful dividing line. It's true that male and female are two stable sexual categories, but the details of how you identify sex (and how each sex responds to treatments) ends up being very bimodal[1]. So the social categories of male sex and female sex overlay complicated, individual biological systems. [1] https://twitter.com/ScienceVet2/status/1035246030500061184 https://twitter.com/ScienceVet2/status/1035246030500061184
- dv_dt 6y agoWether, it's a useful dividing line has more to do with what question one is trying to answer via the line. Different questions are likely to use different concerns yielding different definitions.
- steveeq1 6y agoYou're playing with semantics.
- kleer001 6y ago
- dang 6y agoRecent and related: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24304191 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24304191