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 …
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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 …
Povidone-Iodine Safety, Efficacy, and Lugol’s
In the last issue, I covered the potential of nasal irrigation, rinsing, and gargling with 0.5% povidone-iodine to kill SARS-CoV-2, the coronavirus that causes COVID-19. Several issues then came up as responses that I consider worth addressing: How well can we generalize from the in vitro (test tube) study to the likely in vivo (live …
Povidone-Iodine Kills the Coronavirus in 60 Seconds
On May 26, a preprint* was released providing the first direct evidence that povidone-iodine, a widely used antiseptic, is capable of killing SARS-CoV-2, the coronavirus that causes COVID-19. As little as 0.5% povidone-iodine completely inactivated the virus in 60 seconds, comparable to 70% alcohol. Greater concentrations were equally effective but provided no additional benefit. This …
Vitamin D Does Not Explain the Race/Ethnicity-COVID-19 Relationship
While I was out, a peer-reviewed paper was published in the journal, Diabetes and Metabolic Syndrome: Clinical Research & Reviews that strongly challenges the idea that vitamin D status explains the relationship between race and ethnicity and COVID-19 risk, and adds to the growing data suggesting the relationship between vitamin D and infection risk is weak. …
The First Vitamin D Study With Pre-Infection Levels Weakens the Association
Yesterday the very first COVID-19 study using pre-infection vitamin D status was released as a preprint.* Using data from the electronic health records of patients treated at University of Chicago Medicine, of the 4,314 people who were tested for COVID-19, 499 had their vitamin D status measured in the year before the COVID-19 test, excluding …
ACE2 Probably Does Not Explain Why Older Males Have More Severe Disease
In an April 16 YouTube video titled “Vitamin D may reduce susceptibility to COVID-19-associated lung injury,” Dr. Rhonda Patrick of Found My Fitness suggested that older people have more severe COVID-19 outcomes than younger people and males have more severe outcomes than females because each of these groups has lower ACE2. This was in the …
ACE Inhibitors and ARBs in COVID-19: Unrelated to ACE2 and Apparently Not a Problem
A preprint* released yesterday by collaborators from the medical schools of Stanford, Columbia, University of Minnesota, UC San Diego, and Taiwan’s China Medical School provided the first evidence of the expression of ACE2 in the upper respiratory tract among humans with different risk factors and found that it is slightly lower in those using ACE …
Do Glutathione Supplements Work?
In response to yesterday’s update about glutathione and COVID-19, a number of questions came in on social media about whether glutathione can be absorbed intact, whether supplements need to be liposomal, and whether N-acetyl-cysteine (NAC) would be just as effective or even better. Glutathione is absorbed intact in laboratory animals, and crosses human intestinal cells …