E-Paper
New study suggests men take longer than women to recover from Covid-19
A new analysis of Covid-19 patients admitted in the isolation ward of a Mumbai hospital, and three families who tested positive for the virus, has found that men
A new analysis of Covid-19 patients admitted in the isolation ward of a Mumbai hospital, and three families who tested positive for the virus, has found that men have a delayed viral clearance compared to women patients -- or, simply put, men test positive for the virus for a longer time than women.The analysis does not mention if men also remain symptomatic for a longer time.
The yet-to-be-published paper uploaded in MedRxiv, a preprint server for health research papers, suggests that high expression of ACE2 (an enzyme the Sars-Cov-2 virus uses to enter the body) in the testes raises the possibility that testicular viral reservoirs may be playing a role in viral persistence among male patients.
The study was conducted by 10 scientists from the Kasturba Hospital for Infectious Diseases, Mumbai; Montefiore Medical Center and Albert Einstein College of Medicine, New York; Department of Microbiology, Topiwala National Medical College and BYL Nair Charitable Hospital, Mumbai, involved 68 patients -- 48 men and 20 women, with a median age of 35 -- admitted to Kasturba Hospital with infectious diseases. seven members of three families tested positive.
Swabs collected at the time of diagnosis were tested using the Reverse Transcriptase-Polymerase Chain Reaction (RT-PCR) method and subsequent swabs were collected at approximately 48 hour intervals until they tested negative. The median time for testing negative for male patients was six days, compared to four days for women, the study said.
“ACE2 was determined to be highly expressed in testicular cells at the protein levels. Interestingly, very little expression of ACE2 was seen in ovarian tissue. Taken together, these observations demonstrate for the first time that male subjects have delayed viral clearance of Sars-CoV-2 (the virus that cause Covid-19). High expression of ACE2 in testes raises the possibility that testicular viral reservoirs may play a role in viral persistence in males,” the paper concluded.
To be sure, the theory is still to be validated.
“It is true that ACE2 receptors are present in the testicular cells and the virus may be binding there and staying for a longer time. But this is the only paper which is saying this could be the reason. At the moment, we cannot generalise,” said Dr Shobha Broor, the former head of the All India Institute of Medical Sciences (AIIMS) department of virology, who has read the paper.
