2023-11-21 11:45:04
Extra pounds promote health problems, but do they really make a person more vulnerable to COVID-19, the pandemic disease caused by the SARS-CoV-2 coronavirus? A recent study sought the answer to this question.
The research had its genesis when it was observed at the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic that many of the people hospitalized with this disease, and especially those who presented complications, were elderly people who were overweight or obese. From here, we wanted to investigate whether there was really a relationship between excess weight or weight loss and the disease.
The Food, Nutrition, Development and Mental Health (ANUT-DSM) research group of the Department of Biochemistry and Biotechnology of the Rovira i Virgili University (URV) and the Pere Virgili Health Research Institute (IISPV), in the Catalan province of Tarragona , took advantage of the fact that some 7,000 adults from all over Spain were participating in a large nutrition trial, Predimed-Plus, coordinated precisely by the director of the same research group, the professor of the Department of Biochemistry and Biotechnology of the URV Jordi Salas Salvadó, to use the data collected in said trial in the new research. And the participants in Predimed-Plus are overweight or obese (the objective of the study is to what extent eating a healthy Mediterranean diet, avoiding excess calories and doing regular physical activity benefits health) and, in addition, it is possible to know by their medical records whether or not they contracted COVID-19 from the start of the pandemic until December 2021.
“We have carefully analyzed whether, at the time of joining the trial, participants who had higher weight, body mass index, waist circumference, were more likely to test positive for COVID-19. And, as expected, this is the case,” explains Jordi Salas, principal investigator of the study. Going further, it has also been studied whether the risk of contracting the disease differed between people who had lost weight, those who had gained weight, and those who had a stable weight during the time they were in the trial before the pandemic. “We found that those who lost 5% or more of their body weight during the study had a lower risk of COVID-19 compared to those who gained weight.”
Photograph captured using an electron microscope and then processed showing a human cell infected with viral particles of the SARS-CoV-2 coronavirus, shown in yellow. (Image: NIAID/NIH)
Overall, each kilogram increase in body weight or each one-unit increase in waist circumference, during the 5- to 6-year study period before the pandemic, was associated with an increased risk of COVID-19 in people of elderly with overweight or obesity and high cardiovascular risk. These analyzes took into account other factors that could increase or decrease your risk of COVID-19, such as the participant’s sex, where they lived, their level of education, their marital status, whether they had health problems such as diabetes , hypertension, whether or not they had received at least one medication…
Thus, according to researcher Sangeetha Shyam, “in vulnerable older adults who are overweight or obese and at high cardiovascular risk, achieving clinically significant weight loss may be important to protect against COVID-19. Given that climate change, increased migration in big cities, and global travel are expected to increase the frequency with which pandemics occur, this finding will be of great help in establishing prevention strategies in case of similar future pandemics. to COVID.”
In addition to Salas and Shyam, Nancy Babio, also from the ANUT-DSM research group of the Department of Biochemistry and Biotechnology of the URV and the IISPV, and Montse Fitó, from the Hospital de Mar Research Institute in Barcelona, participated in the study. They are all members of the Networked Biomedical Research Center for the Physiopathology of Obesity and Nutrition (CIBEROBN) in Spain.
The study is entitled “Association of adiposity and its changes over time with COVID-19 risk in older adults with overweight/obesity and metabolic syndrome: a longitudinal evaluation in the PREDIMED-Plus cohort”. And it has been published in the academic journal BMC Medicine. (Source: URV)
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