Since my last newsletter, none of the new preprints* look interesting enough for deep dives, but a number deserve a mention. Here they are. One showed that immune system cells known as neutrophils respond to SARS-CoV-2, the coronavirus that causes COVID-19, with “neutrophil extracellular traps” (NETs), which play a role in damaging lung tissue. I …
Lactoferrin, Whey Protein, and COVID-19
Lactoferrin is an iron-binding protein naturally present in milk that has a number of properties that make it important for newborns, with antimicrobial properties being some of them. Lactoferrin from cows, or bovine lactoferrin, is commonly available as a supplement. Can it help with COVID-19? My position, explained below, is that, although it does inhibit …
COVID-19, Iron, and the Anemia of Chronic Disease
A new meta-analysis on COVID-19 and iron metabolism was released as a preprint* yesterday by researchers from Turkey, Colombia, Hungary, Switzerland, and the Netherlands. Meta-analyses are studies that pool the results of many studies together to look at the net results. The analysis included 56 studies that together included 14,044 COVID-19 patients. 49 studies reported …
A Few Interesting COVID-19 Studies From Today
Nothing published in preprint* form was interesting enough for me to take a deep dive into, but there were a few studies worth mentioning, and here they are. One paper suggested that tocilizumab, an inhibitor of interleukin-6 (IL-6), reduces mortality from COVID-19. Whether patients received it, after some basic inclusion criteria, was left to the judgment …
Mayo Clinic Data on Long-Term Shedding, Antibodies, and Positive/Negative Flipping
The Mayo Clinic has an exclusive partnership with nference, Inc., a company with a software platform to analyze and synthesize biomedical data. Together, they released a preprint* today quantifying how long COVID-19 patients shed the virus after they are tested, and quantifying how many patients flip back and forth between positive and negative tests. Just …
COVID-19 Specifically Targets Sweet Tastes
In a preprint* released today, Polish researchers uncovered more specific aspects of the taste disorder caused by COVID-19, showing it especially blunts the perception of sweetness at low concentrations of sugar. I personally find this very interesting because it adds to the data that are slowly but steadily swaying me toward the belief that I …