Are overweight people more prone to the new coronavirus?

One of the biggest risk factors leading to hospitalizations of patients infected with COVID-19 is being overweight!

In a recent study of more than 4,000 patients in New York, researchers found that, by age, obesity is one of the most important factors associated with poor outcomes (including deaths) in the fight against the new coronavirus.

“People who are overweight must be extremely careful. That’s why we are worried about our friends in America, where the problem of obesity is well known and where they will probably have the most COVID problems because of it,” said Jean-François Delfraissy, head of France’s scientific council for coronavirus.

In this study, led by Christopher Petrilli of the New York University Grossman School of Medicine, the team evaluated several factors that were associated with critical illness and hospitalization of COVID-19 infected patients. For the 4,103 patients tested positive, different characteristics were evaluated to identify the highest risk factors among those who contributed to severe manifestations of the disease.

The researchers found that age was the highest risk factor for hospitalizations and critical care, followed by obesity, heart failure and chronic kidney disease. In research, the most surprising finding was the presence of inflammatory markers, which seem to indicate that patients would need critical care and could explain the risk of obesity in the new coronavirus disease.

The chronic condition with the strongest association with critical illness was obesity, with a substantially higher ratio than any cardiovascular or lung disease, which surprised researchers at New York University. Although obesity is well known to be a pro-inflammatory condition, none of the initial reports in China examined obesity as a risk factor, so there was insufficient evidence to demonstrate the importance and major impact of this risk factor.

In severe cases of COVID-19, the body reacts by excessive inflammation, causing lung irritation, but obesity itself increases the amount of inflammation in the body. These results are appreciated as correct and true by other researchers such as Ian Hall, director of the Center for Biomolecular Sciences at U.K. University. from Nottingham, who said the study provided a “valuable analysis” of patients with COVID-19 and argued that obesity was a “major risk factor” in critical cases.

Although obesity may be associated with other conditions that put the patient at greater risk, such as diabetes and heart failure, researchers have tried to verify this as well, and it seems that obesity is itself an independent risk factor for a worsening condition. disease.

People with severe obesity have a lower level of oxygen than a person with a normal weight and it is this low level of oxygen that is one of the main reasons for hospitalization. In addition, as mentioned above, obesity is itself associated with an increased inflammatory response in the body, so the inflammatory response to SARS-CoV-2 infection is increased in obese people, compared to individuals with a normal BMI.

Obesity is a major risk factor for diabetes and heart disease, largely due to its effect on metabolic and inflammatory pathways. Any way to reduce this risk factor changes the course of COVID-19 and can help reduce its impact and improve survival. Given the growing obesity epidemic worldwide, this is certainly an extremely important combination, as obesity can increase both the severity of COVID-

19 and the risk of mortality. If we take into account the extremely high rates of obesity in the world, we can expect a high percentage of the population that will be infected with coronavirus to have BMI above normal.

It is not too late to make changes in our eating habits, especially since we have tools at hand, the Dahna application being one of them.

Source: here.