AI discovers important risk factor

Since the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic doctors and scientists have learned a great deal about disease It is on pathogen which causes it, the coronavirus SARS-CoV-2, nevertheless, almost two years after the first cases of “mysterious pneumonia” a Wuhan there are still several mysteries to unravel. In addition to that onorigin, at the center of a real diplomatic tug-of-war between China and the United States, one of the most significant is that relating to severity of the infection. If in fact it is true that the Senior citizens, men, subjects who suffer from obesity, diabetes, cardiovascular pathologies and others comorbilità represent the categories most exposed to the risk of severe COVID-19, ending in intensive care e they die even several people young, who were perfectly healthy before being infected with SARS-CoV-2. How is it possible? A possible answer to this question comes from a thorough investigation conducted through aartificial intelligence, which he identified in the high blood sugar (high levels of sugars in the blood) the factor that could unite the “unexplained” cases.

Leading the study was a Swiss research team made up of scientists from the “Blue Brain Project”Of the Federal Polytechnic School of Lausanne (EPFL), Geneva section. Put simply, this is a great project based onautomatic learning which uses a very powerful computer network for simulate the human brain and analyze vast amounts of data. In the specific case, the team led by Professor Henry Markram, founder and director of the Blue Brain Project, have “fed” the data of hundreds of thousands of studies on the coronavirus, entered into the database, to the artificial intelligence COVID-19 Open Research Dataset (CORD-19). “Since the beginning of 2020, Blue Brain has been proactively contributing to the fight against COVID-19,” Professor Markram said in a press release. “With this call to action, we realized that we could use our machine learning technologies and data engineering expertise to develop the text and data mining tools needed to try and help the medical community. Blue Brain set out to answer one of the most puzzling aspects of this pandemic: why some people get seriously ill, while others are completely symptom-free, ”the expert added.

Thanks to the super artificial intelligence and the enormous amount of data of CORD-19, Swiss researchers have been able to monitor every stage of the infection, from the moment the coronavirus enters the lungs until it exits the lung cells and spreads throughout theorganism, ready to attack other organs and tissues. Throughout the pathological phase, machine learning determined that the most predictive factor of severe illness they were high glucose levels (sugar) in the blood. Because of this condition, in fact, the pandemic pathogen seems to have an easier life in circumventing the first defenses of our organism, when it makes its way fromrespiratory system and begins his fierce battle with the immune system. With high blood sugars the virus is also more likely to win over and invade alveolar cells, where it can trigger i more serious damage and precipitate the patient’s clinical condition. In addition to breaking down the antiviral defenses in the lungs, the high levels of glucose are also able to reduce the effectiveness of the immune system and promote the infamous cytokine storm. Glucose, according to the Swiss team, also promotes cell invasion and catalyzes the risk of l ‘multi-organ failure.

“From the facts and results of thousands of documents analyzed, there was evidence that elevated blood glucose levels were caused by abnormal or induced glucose metabolism during hospitalization, drug treatments or intravenous administration. This approach correlated extremely well with the severity of COVID-19 across the population and revealed how elevated glucose aids virtually every stage of viral infection, from its onset in the lungs to serious complications such as Acute respiratory distress syndrome, multi-organ failure and the thrombotic events”, Explain the scientists. The results, of course, will need to be confirmed by thorough clinical investigations. The details of the research “A Machine-Generated View of the Role of Blood Glucose Levels in the Severity of COVID-19” have been published in the scientific journal Frontiers in Public Health.