Women may mount stronger immune response to coronavirus, study suggests
- New study said men and women developed different types of immune responses to Covid-19
- This could imply that they need different treatments
A new study looking at male and female immune responses to the new coronavirus may shed new light on why men are more likely to become seriously ill with Covid-19, researchers said.
Since early in the pandemic it has been clear that men, particularly older men, are at a far higher risk of dying from the virus than women of a similar age, but scientists have not yet been able to pinpoint exactly why.
A new study published in the journal Nature noted that globally men account for about 60 per cent of deaths from Covid-19 and looked at whether differences in immune responses could explain why.
“What we found was that men and women indeed develop different types of immune responses to Covid-19,” said the study’s lead author Akiko Iwasaki, a professor at Yale University.
The immunity specialist said “these differences may underlie heightened disease susceptibility in men”.