In this video, we speak to Sabra Klein, Professor at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health about sex differences in relation to COVID-19.
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Transcript:
COVID-19, has been said to affect men and women differently, with men thought to be more likely to become severely ill and die from the disease.
To find out more about sex differences in COVID-19, we spoke to Professor Sabra Klein, from the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health.
According to data from around the world, including preliminary data from the UK, an equal number of males and females contract the disease, but do we see the same symptoms?
Where we are seeing real differences, in terms of larger magnitude of a male-female difference is in severity of disease.
When the virus enters our body, it needs to enter our cells in order to replicate. Successfully making it into the cell, the virus tries to replicate itself. Estrogen in women is thought to make this harder, meaning that the virus can’t make as many copies of itself in women.
Once the immune system realises the virus has infiltrated its cells, it launches an attack to try and clear out the infection from its cells.
Generally speaking, women tend to mount more robust immune responses that can be beneficial for initially recognising and initiating the clearance of a virus. So that can be beneficial. Where it can be detrimental is if long-term responses are not properly regulated, so you can get excessive immune responses that can contribute to long-term inflammation and that in and of itself can cause some tissue damage.
In addition to these sex differences in physiology, there are also important behavioural differences. Men are less likely to go to hospital until later in their disease. However, as healthcare workers are often women, we may still see a shift away from the male bias of the disease as the pandemic progresses.
