Women's testosterone levels may be the answer, and could help combat scientific sexism
Among the many mysteries surrounding the coronavirus, one of the most troubling is why women… – seem to suffer from this disease more often and in a more severe form than men. Now scientists are beginning to think that hormones — and how they affect women and men differently — could be the key in the fight against Covid-19.
A new study from a renowned team of researchers at Yale School of Medicine found that women with long-term COVID-19 had significantly lower testosterone levels compared to those who recovered from the infection. This difference appears to be due to certain symptoms that female patients experience more frequently and more severely than male patients. These include headaches, hair loss, muscle pain and memory problems.
Low testosterone levels in women have also been linked to increased levels of certain immune cells, as well as signs of reactivation of dormant viruses. Although the researchers found that men with long-term COVID-19 had lower levels of estradiol and testosterone, their symptoms were less severe and other immune cells were activated.
The findings suggest that hormones deserve much more attention .
This work has not yet been peer reviewed, but now, given the enormous need for long-term treatment for COVID-19 — the latest data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention showed that in 2022, about 8.8 million people in the US alone were diagnosed with the disease, — researchers will try to speed up the process of verifying their theory.
The fact is that the discovery could directly affect treatment options. People are already taking hormone therapy for other conditions, making it easy to test whether testosterone can help patients fight COVID-19 in the long term. Even if hormones cannot address the root cause of the disease, significant relief of symptoms would be a huge achievement.
A team of researchers methodically studied the differences between people with long-term COVID-19 and those who recover easily from the infection. In 2023, they identified a set of biomarkers that can be measured in blood or saliva that differ among people with the disease. All of these signals indicated that the immune system was constantly working under strain, a finding supported by other recent developments in the fight against disease.
Testosterone is thought to act as a “brake” on the immune system. for an overactive immune system, so it should not be a complete surprise that levels of this hormone decrease in people with long-term COVID-19.
“Because men produce much more testosterone than women, differences in the hormonal composition of long-term COVID sufferers are easily hidden in population data,” — notes immunobiologist Akiko Iwasaki.
But critics of the theory point out that researchers do not have data on hormone levels in people before they became infected with COVID-19.
“When we are healthy, the levels of these hormones rise and fall according to a precisely calculated schedule. If they appear to be persistently low in people with long-term COVID-19, it could mean there is something wrong with the organs that produce them; if they're just out of rhythm, maybe that's all it takes — this is to restore the correct heart rate,” — explain the scientists.
For too long, according to immunobiologists, differences in sex hormones have been viewed as an inconvenient nuisance in clinical trials rather than a variable worthy of attention. Until recently, many drugs were studied only in male mice so that the results were not distorted by fluctuations in female hormones, and even human tests were focused on men.
Meanwhile, chronic diseases such as chronic fatigue syndrome, Lyme disease, and now COVID-19, tend to be more common or more severe in women.
«Research may begin to correct the shortcomings of this kind of sexism and ableism in women's health,&rdash ; says David Putrino, Director of Rehabilitation Innovation at Mount Sinai Health System.
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