Steroid therapy for severely ill COVID-19 patients had little effect on women: study

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According to a University of Calgary study published this week, the drugs used to treat severely ill COVID-19 patients had little or no benefit to women.

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Dexamethasone, one of the main treatments for severe COVID-19 pulmonary infections, alters the function of immune cells and studies how people’s immune system responds to COVID-19, identifying the patient’s gender. It has been shown that it can affect the effectiveness of the drug. Dexamethasone. Studies have found that the drug may only benefit male patients.

Dr. Bryan Yipp, an associate professor at the University’s School of Critical Care Medicine, said: Of Calgary’s Cumming School of Medicine.

“Currently, the flagship treatment for severe COVID-19 we are giving to everyone may benefit only half of the population. This is a big problem.”

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Led by Yip Interdisciplinary research With Dr. Jeff Bianaski, a professor of comparative biology and medicine in the Faculty of Veterinary Medicine.

Steroids were first identified as a treatment to help patients with severe illness when doctors and researchers were fighting for an effective treatment for COVID-19 at the start of the 2020 pandemic. However, steroids have had only moderate success in reducing COVID mortality, and it was not clear how steroids benefit patients.

Yipp and Biernaskie began their studies before it was understood how immune cells respond to COVID-19 infection at the cellular level. They wanted to better understand why steroids are helping and why the tests show why they are primarily helping men.

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“I wanted to study the responses of different people to SARS-CoV-2 infection and how different immune responses determine the severity of their illness so that new treatments can be developed. “I said in a news release at the University of Calgary.

By assessing state data on intensive care patients throughout the pandemic, they found that the number of men dying from COVID-19 in Alberta decreased when dexamethasone therapy was introduced into treatment. .. However, the same treatment did not affect the condition of the female.

The research team analyzed thousands of immune cells from COVID-19 and non-COVID-19 patients in the Calgary ICU due to severe dyspnea. According to the news release, they used single-cell RNA-seqing and bioinformatics technology to analyze the immune cells of each patient in the Biernaskie lab.

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Researchers have measured the therapeutic effect and the various stages of COVID-19 and non-COVID-19 infections that have caused such serious illnesses.

In Alberta, the number of COVID-19 cases is evenly divided between men and women. Of the 330,098 total cases reported by Monday, 165,895 were male and 164,059 were female.

However, more men died of COVID-19 than women. As of Monday, Alberta Health reported that of the 3,188 deaths, 1,810 were male and 1,376 were female. The remaining two dead are listed as unknown.

According to Biernaskie, the research team sampled as many patients as possible and followed up to observe the evolution of people’s illness and immune response during the pandemic process.

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“We have found that giving dexamethasone to patients, especially in men, significantly suppresses the interferon response of neutrophils,” Biernaskie said.

“But in females, dexamethasone had little effect because the interferon response of neutrophils was much more suppressed than in males.”

Yip said that solutions to sexual prejudice in treatments such as dexamethasone therapy can help researchers find treatments that benefit more people or eliminate personalized medicine that eliminates a “comprehensive approach” to treatment. He said it was to pursue.

Biernaskie and Yipp worked closely with trainees and young scientists for their research and were funded through the Thistledown Foundation and the Calgary Firefighters Burn Treatment Society. Biernaskie is the chair of the Calgary Firefighters Burn Treatment Association for Skin Regeneration and Wound Healing, which has diverted some funding to support early pandemic research.

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