Feb 16 (Reuters) – The following is a summary of some recent
studies on COVID-19. They include research that warrants further
study to corroborate the findings and that has yet to be
certified by peer review.

Higher estrogen levels tied to lower COVID death risk

A new study strengthens suspicions that the female hormone
estrogen protects against death from COVID-19.

Researchers in Sweden studied 14,685 older women with
COVID-19, all of whom were past menopause, during which estrogen
levels decline dramatically. Seventeen percent were taking
estrogen supplements to relieve menopausal symptoms. After
adjusting for other risk factors, women getting extra estrogen
had a 53% lower risk of dying from COVID-19 compared to
untreated women, the researchers reported on Monday in BMJ Open
https://bmjopen.bmj.com/content/12/2/e053032. Observational
studies such as this one cannot prove higher estrogen levels are
protective. Furthermore, the women were infected before vaccines
were available, said Dr. Malin Sund of Umea University.

“Vaccination has clearly been shown to protect from COVID-19
related mortality and the potential added value from estrogen
(in vaccinated women) cannot be estimated from this data,” Sund
said. The idea that estrogen might be protective in hospitalized
COVID-19 patients is now being tested more rigorously in a
randomized controlled trial at Tulane University https://clinicaltrials.gov/ct2/show/NCT04865029.

Antacid shows promise against COVID-19 symptoms

In non-hospitalized, unvaccinated adults with
mild-to-moderate COVID-19, treatment with a high dose of the
antacid drug famotidine helped speed resolution of symptoms and
inflammation in a small randomized controlled trial.

Roughly half of those in the 55-patient trial took
famotidine – the main ingredient in Johnson & Johnson’s
widely used over-the-counter Pepsid heartburn drug – three times
a day for two weeks. The others took a dummy pill. Patients in
the famotidine group had faster resolution of 14 of 16 symptoms
assessed in the study, including loss of smell and taste,
difficulty breathing and abdominal pain. Famotidine treatment
also led to faster improvements in markers of inflammation
without any detrimental effects on patients’ immune responses,
the researchers reported in the journal Gut .
About a third of the study’s participants were Black and a
quarter Hispanic.

“We hope that the data we are sharing with this study guide
future trials that are necessary to confirm famotidine as a
treatment for patients with COVID-19,” study leader Dr. Tobias
Janowitz of Northwell Health and Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory
said in a news release.

U.S. may have overestimated COVID-19 hospitalizations

U.S. statistics likely overestimate how many patients have
been hospitalized for COVID-19, according to a new study.

At 60 hospitals near Boston, Pittsburgh and Chicago,
researchers manually reviewed the charts of a random sample of
1,123 patients with confirmed coronavirus infections
hospitalized between March 2020 and August 2021. Roughly 1-in-4
patients “actually were admitted for a different problem and
should not have been included” in data analytics calculations of
the severity of COVID-19, said Dr. Shawn Murphy of Massachusetts
General Hospital in Boston. Patients were more likely to have
been admitted specifically for COVID-19 when local infection
rates were high, his team reported on Tuesday on medRxiv https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2022.02.10.22270728v1
ahead of peer review. When infection rates were low last
summer, up to half the patients were hospitalized for other
reasons, with SARS-CoV-2 infection found coincidentally on
mandatory testing. The researchers were able to identify
indicators in patients’ charts that admissions were actually due
to COVID-19, such as whether doctors ordered lab tests related
to inflammation.

“This study highlights an important weakness in COVID-19
reporting, which might have implications on intensive care
utilization, cost analysis, resource planning, and research,”
said Jeffrey Klann, also of Mass General. Adding the identified
indicators to data analytics software “could help mitigate these
problems.”

Click for a Reuters graphic https://tmsnrt.rs/3c7R3Bl on
vaccines in development.

(Reporting by Nancy Lapid and Megan Brooks; Editing by Bill
Berkrot)