Invisible Women: oestrogenic ruminations
Invisible Women: oestrogenic ruminations
default male hamsters and gender neutral humans
My dear GFPs, hello and welcome to the week in data nonsense! Let’s jump right to it, shall we?
Gender data gap of the week
Regular and/or long-time readers of this newsletter may remember that I’ve returned a few times to the issue of Covid and its potential interaction with oestrogen.
From the very early days of the pandemic, it was clear that this virus was killing more men than women — although, as many GFPs will ALSO remember, at the beginning it was difficult to know if this was a gender (did socially driven behaviours mean men were more likely to catch it) or sex difference (did the virus itself affect men differently), because very few countries were collecting the necessary sex disaggregated data. Those were some fun times!!1!
Now, as you all know, I am by no means hostile to any argument that results in more men washing their hands after they use the toilet, but the disparity in the figures did somewhat inevitably lead me back to Invisible Women, and in particular to a study I wrote about in Chapter Ten. In this study, when researchers exposed male and female cells to a oestrogen, and then to a virus, only the female cells responded to the oestrogen and fought off the virus.
These findings did not prevent doctors in New York from treating male Covid patients with oestrogen to see if that helped. I’ve been sporadically keeping an eye on that study to see what happened to it in the end and I can now in no way exclusively reveal that the study was terminated before completion with no results posted. So I guess we’ll never know, but my wild stab in the dark guess is that, no, simply sticking oestrogen patches on male Covid patients will not cause them to develop a female immune system because they will still have male cells that will respond to the oestrogen differently.
Anyway, I was reminded of my oestrogenic ruminations when I ran across this study, which came out towards the end of last year:
Yeah, I don’t know why they have to write like that either. Let me try to parse this for you (and me tbh). So, as we all know, the spike protein on the Covid virus is the big baddie that lets it infect our cells. It does this by binding with various elements within our cells, the most famous being the ACE2 enzyme. However, what these researchers have found is that this is not the only part of the cell the spike gets busy with. It turns out that it ALSO has a big fancy for oestrogen receptors: this, say the researchers, may explain the more systemic nature of Covid infection — oestrogen receptors are found all over the human body. So far so interesting to nerds like me.
What is particularly interesting for our purposes however, is that the oestrogen receptors responded differently according to sex. So, basically, the spike seemed to, in laywoman’s terms, kind of shift the receptor out of its correct place in the cell — but it did this far more in male cells than in females cells.
So much for the cell studies. The researchers now moved on to animal studies. Specifically, Syrian golden hamsters. Even more specifically, male Syrian golden hamsters.
The male hamsters’ oestrogen receptors reacted as expected, so then they moved onto humans of unspecified sex, which is helpful, I guess sex doesn’t matter after all!
Anyway, overall and in conclusion, the study found an interesting sex difference and then proceeded to either ignore sex or study only the male sex. The paper authors did, however, in their conclusion point to another interesting study, (this one did manage to include female hamsters), which found that treating male hamsters with oestrogen….did not…
in fact…
help them fight off Covid. QE and indeed D.
Here endeth the oestrogenic rumination of the week.
Default male of the week
I do! I am!
Homework
As faithful listeners of my podcast know, I LOVE a good Standard, so I was delighted to see this new British Standard being developed for menopausal health in the workplace. And you can help develop it! Only one snag: it closes a week TOMORROW. So get commenting!
Listen to Keanu, GFPs, for he is wise. And also, he is hot.
Poppy pic of the week
What a little darling ❤️
That’s it, GFPs! Until next time…xoxoxo
By the way, I say it here because I keep forgetting it and I want to tell you since November. I read a fiction book: The Shetland Sea Murders by Marsali Taylor. Perhaps you are already aware. She mentions your research in one chapter and also mentions you in the acknowledgments. I borrowed it from the library so I can’t check all the details, like page etc, just before the middle I think. I was delighted to see it. Don’t ask me why. Perhaps I’m proud of your work ;-). Too cheesy eh?
I love your sense of humour. Peculiar that the study moved to gangsters! Sorry! Male Hamsters. Why? And then female too. What do you think it’s the logic without spelling it out for me, although I might needed it.