HELSINKI, Feb. 18: The female hormone estrogen may protect women from severe heart disease and death caused by COVID-19, said Helsinki University Hospital (HUS) in a press release on Thursday.
The estrogen supplement halved the risk of death due to COVID-19 in women, according to a joint study by HUS, the University of Helsinki, and the University of Umea of Sweden.
The mortality rate for women receiving the estrogen supplement was 2.1 percent, compared with 4.6 percent for women in the control group, according to the study.
The study has been published in BMJ Open, a peer-reviewed open-access medical journal.
The study compared the mortality of women diagnosed with COVID-19 disease at the beginning of the pandemic with the effect of estrogen on mortality.
The study included around 15,000 women aged 50 to 80 who were diagnosed with COVID-19 related heart disease between February and September 2020. The 2,500 women in the study had estrogen replacement therapy for menopausal symptoms, and about 200 women received estrogen-lowering medication after cancer treatment. There were 12,000 women in the control group who did not receive estrogen-increasing or estrogen-lowering medication.
The group receiving estrogen-lowering therapy had the highest risk of death. However, a causal relationship to estrogen could not be established as patients in this group were older than the control group and had received cancer treatment. Age and cancer treatments increase the risk of serious heart disease and death caused by COVID-19.
"Our study does not yet lead to a change in treatment practices, so estrogen therapy should not be started or estrogen-lowering medication should be discontinued based on this study," said Malin Sund, professor and chief physician at HUS, in the press release.
The study was conducted before COVID-19 vaccines were available. Thus, it is not yet possible to deduce from the study how much estrogen reduces the risk of serious illness and death among vaccinated women, said the release.
JAN 23: A new form of Omicron named BA.2 has been designated a "variant under investigation," with 426 cases of the Omicron variant sub-lineage confirmed in the United Kingdom (UK), the UK Health Security Agency (UKHSA) said Friday.
"Overall, the original Omicron lineage, BA.1, is dominant in the UK and the proportion of BA.2 cases is currently low," with the earliest dated Dec. 6, 2021, the agency said in a statement.
In total, 40 countries have uploaded 8,040 BA.2 sequences to the Global Initiative on Sharing All Influenza Data (GISAID) since Nov. 17. At this point, it is not possible to determine where the sub-lineage may have originated, it added. The first sequences were submitted from the Philippines, and most samples have been uploaded from Denmark (6,411), while other countries that have uploaded more than 100 samples are India (530), Sweden (181), and Singapore (127), according to the agency.
Meera Chand, incident director at the agency, said new mutations are "expected" as the pandemic continues. "So far, there is insufficient evidence to determine whether BA.2 causes more severe illness than Omicron BA.1, but data is limited and UKHSA continues to investigate."
Official figures on Friday showed the UK added 95,787 COVID-19 cases in the latest 24 hours, bringing its total caseload to 15,709,059, and 288 more deaths, taking the national death toll to 153,490. More than 90 percent of people aged 12 and above in the UK have had their first dose of vaccine, more than 83 percent have taken both shots, and more than 63 percent have received booster jabs.
The king of Swedes said on Saturday that the government might have acted too fast in lifting COVID-19 curbs, after Sweden scrapped limits on public gatherings.
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