Who Gets Long Covid and Why?
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Transcript:
Dr Funmi Okunola: Who gets it and why?
Professor Danny Altmann: So the first high level simple answer to “who gets it”, is anybody who gets infected by the SARS CoV-2 virus and gets Covid-19. So that’s the first simple high level answer and above and beyond, that sure you could try and stratify risk groups couldn’t you? So when we talk about those first wave of real real Long Haulers, of the very scary early days of the pandemic; if you think back to those days that the typical all high risk for hospitalization, high risk for death person, that we were often talking about was often male, a bit older, higher body mass index.
So the first wave cases were people a bit like that. They were over represented in the deaths, over represented in hospitalizations and therefore over represented in first wave long Covid sufferers; and as time has gone by that kind of demographic has shifted enormously.
So now when I think about the long Covid study that we’re doing and the people coming into our Clinic, it looks more like a kind of typical autoimmune disease in other words there’s all sorts; but skewed to people who are female, young to middle-aged, if you had to add in other risk so they’re out outnumbering the men at least two-to-one. If you had to add in other risk factors you’d maybe talk about people with a history of asthma or diabetes; but really it’s anybody, but maybe especially if you’re female.
Dr Funmi Okunola: Why do you think females are outnumbering men by 2 to one in terms of developing long Covid?
Professor Danny Altmann: Yeah well, you could you give a kind of a cynical answer couldn’t you? You could say well maybe it’s an artifact of the way that the Long COVID sufferers come to you because women tend to be more sort of ‘out there’ in terms of discussing and acknowledging their symptoms and being in social media groups to discuss and things like that, so that would be the almost trivial answer. I’m not a big fan of that as a source of bias because coming from a kind of research history in autoimmunity, and I do think this looks a little bit like an autoimmune disease.
In virtually all of these(autoimmune diseases), women tend to outnumber men, at least two to one; and that’s not because they’re more likely to spot it, it’s because among our gender differences from our different sex hormone programs, are many differences in the way that sex hormones program our immune systems and we have slightly different immune systems and female sex hormones drive a slightly more autoimmune program than male ones among the many many differences. So that’s my kind of favorite explanation at the moment.
Professor Danny Altman explains who gets long Covid and why
Long Covid The Answers
