According to a brand new study, previous suspicions that estrogen is responsible for a lower risk of dying from COVID-19 amongst women might just be true after all!
That’s right! It appears that the female hormone generally protects women from passing away upon contracting the virus.
This new research took place in Sweden and as part of it, the researcher team studied no less than 14,685 older women who has tested positive for COVID-19, all of them past menopause when the levels of estrogen drop a lot.
It is important to mention that 17 per cent of them were actually taking estrogen supplements in order to relieve some the symptoms associated with menopause that they were experiencing.
The researchers were able to conclude, after adjusting for other risk factors, that those who were receiving extra estrogen had a 53 per cent lower risk of losing their lives from getting infected with COVID when compared to other women who were not taking estrogen supplements.
This and more was previously reported in BMJ Open earlier this week.
At the same time, you should also keep in mind that such observational studies can’t really prove that estrogen plays a protective role when it comes to COVID complications.
Dr. Malin Sund from Umea University goes on to mention that the women involved in the study were also infected with the virus before the anti-COVID vaccines were available.
Sund explained that “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.”
The hypothesis that high estrogen levels are able to protect hospitalized patients from death is currently getting further testing in a more rigorous, randomized controlled trial at Tulane University so we should soon know with much more certainty soon enough if that is the case or not.
