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This week’s news roundup of some of the latest scientific studies on coronavirus and efforts to find treatments and vaccines for COVID-19 addresses the increased risk for certain groups of people, misconceptions about antibodies to colds, and how neurological symptoms may not be caused directly by the virus. virus.
COVID-19 increases risks for cancer patients
Cancer patients face worse outcomes if they become infected with the coronavirus, a new study shows. However, undergoing recent cancer treatments did not worsen COVID-19 outcomes, so cancer therapies should not be delayed, the research team advises in a report published in the Journal of the National Cancer Institute.
The study involved nearly 23,000 cancer patients who were tested for COVID-19 at the U.S. Veterans Affairs health facility. About 1,800 (7.8%) had tested positive, with no effect of age. about the probability of infection. Rates of COVID-19 were higher in patients with blood cancers (11%) than in those with solid tumors (8%).
Compared to patients who tested negative for the virus, COVID-19 patients had more hospitalizations, required more intensive care, and needed more help to breathe. Death rates were 14% among cancer patients with COVID-19 and 3% among those without the virus.
Across the country, African American and Hispanic cancer patients had higher rates of COVID-19 infection than white cancer patients: 15%, 11%, and 6%, respectively. They also had higher rates of hospitalization.
The actual prevalence of COVID-19 among cancer patients remains uncertain, the researchers note, because many have not been tested for the virus.
Antibodies to the common cold do not protect against COVID-19
Your immune system can produce antibodies that recognize and fight the coronaviruses that cause common colds, but those antibodies are unlikely to protect against the coronavirus that causes COVID-19, new research shows.
At Rockefeller University in New York City, scientists studied blood samples collected and stored before the pandemic from people known to have had common colds in recent months. In test tube experiments, they found that each sample contained antibodies that could recognize and neutralize, or disable, at least one common cold coronavirus, and most could recognize several of those viruses. But none of the samples had antibodies that could recognize and disable a virus that had been modified to look like the new coronavirus, which carries the spike protein that helps it infect healthy cells.
In a report published before the peer review on medRxiv, the researchers say that while there may be rare individuals with antibodies to the common cold that can also attack the COVID-19 virus, their new data suggests those antibodies won’t have much of an effect. . on the population as a whole.
The neurological effects of COVID-19 may reflect the immune response
The new coronavirus may not have significant direct effects on the brain despite neurological problems that have been widely reported.
The researchers examined the brains of 43 COVID-19 patients who died in intensive care units, nursing homes, regular hospital wards, or at home. They found coronavirus proteins in the brain stem, but “little involvement” in the frontal lobe, the part of the brain important for movement, language and high-level functioning. They also saw increases in brain cells called astrocytes, indicating the destruction of other nearby cells. Because critical illness itself may contribute to this finding, it is not clear that COVID-19 is the direct cause.
The presence of the virus was not associated with the severity of the changes in brain tissue, the researchers said. All the brains showed signs of “neuroimmune activation,” meaning that the immune system had been activated to respond to infection in the brain.
Neurological symptoms in patients may be due to the body’s immune response, rather than direct damage from the virus to the central nervous system, the authors reported in The Lancet Neurology.
“We have started to define the immune reaction to the SARS-CoV-2 virus in the brain,” co-author Markus Glatzel of the University Medical Center Hamburg-Eppendorf told Reuters in German. “We believe that the neuroimmune reaction may be a factor that explains some of the neurological symptoms observed in patients with COVID-19.”
