Why women are much better at fighting of f Covid

It’s down to their female hormones, which are now being tested on men!

AS PEOPLE eagerly queue up for their booster jabs, you can be reasonably sure that one group will be underrepresented: men. At every stage in our two-year battle against Covid, men have proven to be the weaker sex. Men have died in much greater numbers from the virus and have also been slower to get vaccinated (the latest NHS data shows 23 per cent more women have had a Covid booster jab than men).

But the fact that men are doing so badly if they get Covid is not entirely our fault — it’s our hormones.

Studies suggest women are being protected against some of the worst effects of the infection by the female hormones oestrogen and progesterone, and researchers are now giving men with Covid these hormones to see if this can prevent prolonged hospitalisation and death.

The different ways the sexes respond to Covid are striking. right at the start of the pandemic, data from China showed that two-thirds of those in hospital were men, and that men who got Covid were 50 per cent more likely to die.

I remember my son, Jack, who was working as a doctor in a Covid ward in Manchester, telling me how struck he was by the extraordinary number of really ill, middle-aged men he was looking after.

That’s not to say that women aren’t getting sick and dying from Covid, but it is happening in lower numbers.

NO DOUBT this is partly linked to men being notoriously bad at looking after their health — they drink and smoke more and eat less fruit and vegetables than women.

And a U.S. study last year found they were less likely to wear masks and obey social-distancing rules, as doing so is considered by many as ‘shameful, not cool and a sign of weakness’.

Men are also more likely to be overweight: 80 per cent of men over 55 are overweight or obese (compared with 68 per cent of women), which helps explain why type 2 diabetes is more common in men (the disease raises your risk of severe symptoms or dying from Covid if you catch it).

But there is also the hormone factor. Women are less susceptible to infectious diseases because oestrogen and progesterone enhance the power of the immune system — but the male hormone, testosterone, seems to suppress it.

The result is that women typically mount a much stronger immune response to infection (oestrogen helps regulate the T cells, a vital part of the immune system) and they also produce a stronger immune response to vaccines.

Because of this hormone-driven superpower, women are also much less likely than men to die from cancer (a key role of your immune system is to destroy cancer cells).

The downside, however, is that women are more likely to develop an autoimmune condition, such as rheumatoid arthritis, where the immune system goes rogue and starts attacking the body.

When it comes to Covid, the evidence is still emerging, but in one of the earliest findings, researchers in Wuhan found that women with lower oestrogen levels were far more likely to suffer severe symptoms. And a recent study from King’s College London, using the Zoe tracking app, found that those aged between 18 and 45 taking the combined Pill (a mix of oestrogen and progesterone) are much less likely to develop symptoms than women not on the Pill.

Similarly, women taking hormone replacement therapy (in the form of oestrogen) who catch Covid are much less likely to die than those who aren’t taking it, according to a study from the Universitats-medizin Berlin, in Germany. researchers are now looking at whether female hormones can help men fight off Covid.

In a small trial published in the journal Chest in July, 40 men hospitalised with moderate or severe Covid were given the usual care, or usual care plus three injections a day of progesterone (previously shown to dampen a ‘cytokine storm’, an immune system over-reaction that can damage organs and cause death).

The progesterone group spent fewer days in hospital and needed less oxygen and ventilation.

Now in a much bigger study, at Tulane University in the U.S., both men and women are being given a mix of progesterone and oestrogen.

An alternative approach is to reduce the male hormone, testosterone. There was a lot of concern last year among my balder-headed friends, when a study found that men with male-pattern baldness (typically driven by higher levels of testosterone) were 40 per cent more likely to end up in hospital with Covid than those with a full head of hair. Other studies produced similar results.

Now German scientists are running a trial giving men with Covid a course of anti-androgens, medicines that will suppress their testosterone levels. A high price to pay, but possibly worth it.

In the meantime, do mask up, get your booster and try to practise social distancing. This is my last column of the year, so stay safe and have a lovely Christmas.