Men With Low Testosterone Levels More Likely To Die From Coronavirus Infection, Study Warns

Male COVID-19 patients with low levels of the testosterone are at greater risk of dying from the infection, according to a recent study.

Older studies have pointed out that men are twice likely to die from COVID-19 but clinicians weren’t able to determine the cause. But this recent study conducted at a hospital in Germany has revealed that the male sex hormone, testosterone might play a crucial role.

How does testosterone affect COVID-19 patients?

The hormone helps regulate the body’s immune response. And when present at low levels, a man’s immune system is not kept in check, can go haywire, and lead to an infection. It also causes a cytokine storm which occurs when one’s immune system goes out of control as it fights a pathogen. A cytokine storm starts to damage a person’s body and when ignored, it can cause fatal consequences.

The study

The researchers analyzed the data of 45 laboratory-confirmed COVID-19 patients admitted to the ICU at the University Medical Center Hamburg-Eppendorf. Thirty-five of them were men and the rest were female. Seven of them required oxygen and 33 of them required ventilator support. Nine men and three women lost their lives to COVID-19.

Key findings of the study:

Hormone levels of each patient were assessed on their initial day of ICU stay, prior to receiving any invasive procedures. The samples collected from these patients were tested for 12 different kinds of hormones including testosterone and dihydrotestosterone.

• Among the male COVID-19 patients, over two-thirds of them (68.8%) recorded low levels of the hormone testosterone
• About 60% of all female COVID-19 patients had elevated levels of testosterone
• While low testosterone levels observed in men did not control immune responses, female COVID-19 patient with higher levels of the hormone recorded more significant inflammatory response

“The majority of male COVID-19 patients had low testosterone levels. Of those male COVID-19 patients who died, the majority also had low testosterone levels. Thus, low testosterone levels in men seem to be a risk factor for severe and even fatal disease outcomes in men upon infection with so-called ‘cytokine inducing’ respiratory viruses,” Gülsah Gabriel, the study’s author and professor from the Leibniz Institute for Experimental Virology in Hamburg told MailOnline.