Drug for severe COVID-19 symptoms mainly benefits males: researcher

University of Calgary researchers joined others around the world, starting last year, in studying the pros and cons of a decades-old drug called Dexamethasone when it comes to treating COVID-19.

According to physicians, the steroid is often used in diseases where it’s thought the immune and inflammatory systems are acting up.

It’s said to only be prescribed in moderately severe to life-threatening COVID cases, not to fight mild symptoms.

“Because the thought is, is that the progression to life-threatening COVID could be due to the immune system as opposed to the virus,” said intensive care physician Dr. Bryan Yipp.

“We’ve been treating people with the steroid to sort of try to dampen the inflammatory response. We hope that it decreases the amount of damage to the lungs, which hopefully will make patients better.”

Yipp and his team studied the genetics of how the drug is affecting the immune system, asking the question ‘what was the mortality rate of ICU patients before and after using dexamethasone?’

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“In thousands of patients in Alberta, men seemed to derive benefit from Dexamethasone. Females did not seem to,” he said.

If you contract COVID and develop a severe lung injury, Yipp explains some of your immune system cells do things they aren’t supposed to, such as injuring a patient’s lungs.

“Luckily for males, the steroids seemed to be able to decrease those bad cells from happening, whereas the females didn’t have as many, so they didn’t seem to benefit as broadly,” he said.

Many new immune-modulatory drugs are coming out, which are reducing death and disability. However, Yipp says they aren’t universal, having only been studied in large populations of people.

“Partly what our study shows is that we really need to look more carefully at all of these new drugs because there might be drugs that have more benefit in females, more benefit in males,” he said.

“I think targeted therapy could be a thing in the future, but I think that these new drugs have just not been tested we just don’t know.”

Yipp says they will continue to analyze the extensive amount of data they collected.

Part of their plan is to study what therapeutics will work best against the syndrome of long-COVID.

“Where people continue to have symptoms, well after the virus leaves,” he said.

“We think that it has something also to do with the immune system and so we’ve got ongoing trials to try to figure out ‘why does your immune system cause you to have these long-COVID symptoms?”’