Having this reduces older women’s chances of dying from COVID-19

By SWNS staff

Older women's chances of dying from COVID-19 could be swayed by hormones, scientists have found.

Having higher levels of estrogen could protect elderly women against severe Coronavirus infections, according to a new study.

Women have a lower risk of catching COVID-19 and ending up on death's door than men, previous studies have found.

This has also been the case with other serious viral infections like Middle East Respiratory Syndrome (MERS), a new disease first discovered in humans in 2012.

Now scientists have found evidence this could be because women have higher levels of ​the sex hormone estrogen.

​Their findings were published in the journal BMJ.

Professor Malin Sund at Umeå University in Sweden said: “This study shows an association between estrogen levels and COVID-19 death.

"Consequently, drugs increasing estrogen levels may have a role in therapeutic efforts to alleviate COVID-19 severity in postmenopausal women and could be studied in randomized control trials.”

Data from 14,685 elderly women who were diagnosed with COVID-19 between February 4 and September 14, 2020 in Sweden was analyzed by the researchers.

Some 227 of these women had been diagnosed with breast cancer and were taking estrogen blocker drugs to prevent it from coming back.

Another 2535 were undergoing hormone replacement therapy (HRT) to boost their estrogen levels and combat the effects of menopause.

The other 11,923 women were not taking any type of treatment and therefore provided the researchers with a control group.

Women's crude chances of dying from COVID-19 were twice as high if they were taking estrogen blockers, the researchers found.

In contrast, they were 54 percent lower among women taking HRT, event after accounting for other possible factors.

As expected, a woman's age was a significant factor in deciding whether they survived the COVID-19 infection, with each extra year associated with 15 percent greater odds.

Having an additional health condition also increased the odds of death by 13 percent, the researchers found.

Those with the lowest household incomes were nearly three times as likely to die as those with the highest.

No data was available for the precise doses of HRT or estrogen blocker drugs which the women were taking.

The findings suggest hormone therapy is worth exploring as a way of reducing the severity of COVID-19 infections.

COVID-19 has infected 18,000,119 people and killed 158,953 since the beginning of the global pandemic.