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Can female sex hormones help male patients beat coronavirus? Doctors say it could give men a fighting chance

Women are less likely to end up in intensive care and are more likely to survive owing to their sex hormones, according to experts
PUBLISHED APR 28, 2020
(Getty Images)
(Getty Images)

Doctors are testing to see whether female sex hormones can help men survive the new coronavirus disease. 

The treatment stems from the idea that female sex hormones could be helping women do a better job at fighting the new coronavirus. Women are less likely to end up in intensive care and are more likely to survive, according to experts.

About 75% of the hospital’s intensive care patients and those on ventilators are men, Dr Sara Ghandehari, a pulmonologist and intensive care physician at Cedars-Sinai in Los Angeles, told The New York Times.

Women tend to have stronger immunity, thanks to the sex hormone estrogen. Experts are hoping the hormone could give men a fighting chance to make a recovery.

Doctors in New York are already treating men with estrogen to see if it works. "We may not understand exactly how estrogen works, but maybe we can see how the patient does," Dr Sharon Nachman, the principal investigator of the trial, told the New York Times. She said the hormone can clear a viral infection and prevent an immune system overreaction — a complication that can be fatal.

Nachman and her colleagues are including 110 patients — confirmed and suspected — showing mild symptoms such as fever, cough, shortness of breath or pneumonia. They will also recruit adult women aged 55 and above because the hormone levels drop with age. 

One-half of these patients will receive the hormone through a skin patch for a week while the other half will not receive the hormone. The team will compare the two groups to see if the estrogen group wards off a severe disease.

Similarly, another group based out of Los Angeles will roll out a trial investigating a different hormone, progesterone. This hormone also appears to be involved in preventing harmful overreactions of the immune system.

Experts are hoping the hormone could give men a fighting chance to make a recovery (Getty Images)

Carrying out the investigation are experts from Cedars-Sinai in Los Angeles. They decided to test progesterone over estrogen because the former does a better job at taming the dangerous immune system overreaction.

They are testing the hormone on 40 adult male patients with mild to moderate COVID-19. About 20 of them will receive two shots of progesterone per day for five days. They will see if this group fares better than the group that does not receive the hormone. 

The researchers said that both hormones are safe. However, the experts have warned participants of possible side-effects like tenderness in the breast and hot flashes.

What about genetic factors?

Besides hormones, genetic factors could be at play too. If sex hormones were the main protective factor for women, then elderly women with who are coronavirus patients would fare as poorly as elderly men. However, that's not the case. "Older men are still disproportionately affected, and that suggests to me it’s got to be something genetic, or something else, that’s not just hormonal," Sabra Klein, a scientist who studies sex differences in viral infections and vaccination responses at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, told The New York Times.

Experts highlight other social factors such as smoking — respiratory diseases often are much worse in smokers — Dr Brian Labus from the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, had earlier told MEA WorldWide (MEAWW).

It could also be down to poor hygiene and a lax attitude toward health among men. Dr Labus said: "Men are also less likely to seek medical care early in the course of illness, so it may be a case of men not receiving care early in the infection. It is likely to be a combination of these factors that lead to higher death rates in men."

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