We have been living with the CoViD-19 virus for almost a year and a half now, but there are still several aspects of the disease that are not at all clear: one of them, for example, is why some people contract the disease asymptomatically and pass almost free from infection, while others end up in hospital and risk dying – regardless of whether they are vaccinated or not. On the subject, a study published in Frontiers in Public Health highlights a data that is in some ways worrying: serious cases of covid would be directly related to the level of glucose in the blood.
For the study, the researchers used a supercomputer to analyze around 240,000 articles published since the start of the pandemic to date, to try to identify the variable most often associated with severe forms of the disease. The response was clear: blood glucose levels are the biological variable most connected to severe forms of covid.
Go ahead. “We have traced every step of the infection, from the moment the virus enters the lungs until it spreads throughout the body and infects organs,” explains Henry Markam, one of the authors. Experts have found that high glucose levels weaken the immune system and facilitate the spread of the virus, which is able to evade the body’s initial defense and enter the respiratory system.
If SARS-CoV-2 is not stopped by our antibodies, it can bind to the ACE2 receptor and enter lung cells, replicating quickly and causing a host of infections, inflammation and cell damage. “We concluded that high glucose levels can facilitate disease progression through various mechanisms,” write the authors, who state that this finding “partly explains the differences found in the population in relation to the severity of the disease.”