By Nancy Lapid
Jan. 6 (Reuters) – The following is a summary of some of the latest scientific studies on the new coronavirus and efforts to find treatments and vaccines for COVID-19, the disease caused by the virus.
Coronavirus can damage the brain without infecting it
The new coronavirus does not need to invade brain tissue directly to damage it, suggests a new study. The researchers examined the brains of 19 patients who died of COVID-19, focusing on tissues from regions considered highly susceptible to the virus: the olfactory bulb, which controls the sense of smell, and the brain stem, which controls breathing and beating. heart attacks. In 14 patients, one or both regions contained damaged blood vessels – some clotted and others leaking. The leaking areas were surrounded by inflammation of the body’s immune response, they found. But the researchers saw no signs of the virus itself, they reported in The New England Journal of Medicine. “We were completely surprised,” said co-author Dr. Avindra Nath of the National Institute of Neurological Diseases and Stroke in a statement. The damage his team saw is often associated with strokes and neuroinflammatory diseases, he said. “So far, our results suggest that the damage … may not have been caused by the SARS-CoV-2 virus that directly infected the brain,” said Dr. Nath. “In the future, we plan to study how COVID-19 damages the blood vessels in the brain and whether it produces some of the short and long-term symptoms that we see in patients.” (https://bit.ly/38jB7K4)
Hair loss increases in New York’s minority communities during the pandemic
Pandemic stress may be causing people to lose their hair, according to a new study. In mid-summer, rates for a hair loss condition called telogen effluvium (ET) increased by more than 400% in a racially diverse neighborhood in New York City, researchers reported in the Journal of the American Academy of Dermatology. From November 2019 to February 2020, the incidence of ET cases was 0.4%. In August, that rate had risen to 2.3%, they found. “It is not clear whether the increase in TE cases is more related to the physiological number of the infection or to extreme emotional stress,” said co-author Dr. Shoshana Marmon, of Coney Island Hospital. The increase was mainly due to ET in people of color, particularly in the Hispanic community, “in line with the disproportionately high mortality rate in this subset of the population due to COVID-19 in NYC,” the authors said. TE rates also increased in minor non-white minorities, but not among blacks, who were also severely affected by COVID-19. Dr. Adam Friedman, of the George Washington School of Medicine and Health Sciences, who was not involved in the research, said he is also seeing increases in ET “and the timing makes a lot of sense, since the onset of the fall is usually three months after the traumatic event “, which would correspond to the emergence of the pandemic. (https://bit.ly/2WRp7sP)
Researchers advocate a dose of vaccine to increase supply
A single dose of one of the COVID-19 vaccines currently available, even if less effective than two doses, may be of greater benefit to the population, three research groups argued on Tuesday in three articles in the journal Annals of Internal Medicine. In large studies, the two-dose regimens of the vaccine from Pfizer Inc and the partner BioNTech SE and Moderna Inc, have shown almost 95% effectiveness in preventing coronavirus disease. Researchers at the Yale School of Public Health say that a single less effective dose may confer greater benefit to the population than a 95% effective vaccine that requires two doses. University of Washington researchers say that doubling vaccination coverage by giving more people a single dose speeds up control of the pandemic, reducing transmission rates. Stanford University researchers say that delaying the second dose in some people could allow millions more to receive the vaccine. “In a public health emergency, there is a powerful case for doing something with less than perfect results if you can help more people quickly,” said Thomas Bollyky of the Council on Foreign Relations in an editorial published with the newspapers. “However, it is far from clear whether alternative approaches to current vaccines would achieve this goal.” The US Food and Drug Administration said on Monday that the idea of changing the authorized dosage or schedules for COVID-19 vaccines was premature and was not supported by available data. (https://bit.ly/2Lp0elG; https://bit.ly/3hSIyej; https://bit.ly/3olRBXK; https://bit.ly/2LsxbgY)
Open https://tmsnrt.rs/3a5EyDh in an external browser to see a Reuters graph of vaccines and treatments under development.
(Reporting by Nancy Lapid and Marilynn Larkin; Editing by Bill Berkrot)