Seniors and body weight can be a super contagion from COVID-19

People who have a higher body mass index due to being overweight or obese and who are older are more likely to spread SARS-CoV-2 because they exhale more respiratory droplets.

The study on age and body mass index and published in the electronic version of Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, was headed by the doctor David A. Edwards, former professor of bioengineering at Harvard University, in Boston.

According to the specialist, the results raise the question of why some people exhale many more respiratory droplets than others. “This work shows that there are few data, such as age, body mass index and very strong correlations with age multiplied by body mass index and respiratory infections themselves,” a declared the professional Medscape.

The COVID-19 disease is transmitted by droplets generated on the mucous surfaces of the airways during the respiratory processes in hosts infected with the virus. severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2). Edward and colleagues studied the generation and expiration of respiratory droplets in human subjects and non-human primates with and without COVID-19 infection to explore whether SARS-CoV-2 infection and other changes of the physiological state result in an evolution. Observable number and size of respiratory droplets exhaled in healthy and sick subjects.

In the new study Edwards and his colleagues measured exhaled respiratory particles in a total of 194 healthy people in two different locations in the United States and in eight non-human primates who had been experimentally infected with SARS-CoV-2. In humans, those with a body mass index multiplied by the age parameter (referred to as body mass index-years) greater than 18% contributed 80% to expired bioaerosols.

Half of the group (73 people) with the lowest BMI years (<650 années-IMC) a expiré significativement moins d'aérosol que la moitié du groupe (73 personnes) avec les années d'IMC les plus élevées (> 650 years of body mass index; p <0.015), the researchers noted.

The study is the first to attribute the ‘super contagion’ capabilities of COVID-19 to individual human characteristics, as opposed to events involving groups or unprotected behavior with masks. “We did other studies in the last 9 months and we still see it. The signature of airborne infectious disease supercontagion can be very directly related to the phenotypic variation of exhaled respiratory droplets between individuals, ”said Edwards.

And I add: “These results suggest that the quantitative assessment and control of exhaled aerosols may be essential in slowing the spread of COVID-19 in the air in the absence of an effective and widely available vaccine.. The supercontagion of infectious diseases transmitted in the air can be very directly linked to the phenotypic variation of the respiratory droplets exhaled between individuals ”.

Edwards is also the Founder and Scientific Director of Sensory cloud, in Boston, which manufactures a product designed to suppress respiratory droplets in the nasal passages. It consists of a nebulizer and a calcium-enriched saline aerosol, which is inhaled and lasts up to 6 hours. He claimed it could help reduce the spread of COVID-19 and other respiratory infections, although other experts are not entirely convinced.

A few days ago, another scientific report realized that The risk of death from COVID-19 is 10 times higher in countries with the highest rate of overweight, as it significantly affects the development of complications of this disease, generating greater possibilities of hospitalization in intensive therapies as well as the need to require mechanical assistance through ventilators. In reality, the risk of death from coronavirus is about 10 times higher in countries where the majority of the population is overweight.

The data comes from the report “COVID-19 and Obesity: The 2021 Atlas. The Cost of Not Addressing the Global Obesity Crisis, ”recently published by the World Obesity Federation (WOF), a former entity known as the International Association for the Study of Obesity and the International Obesity Task Force.

Lobesity It is a non-infectious pandemic which, before the quarantine situations around the world triggered by COVID-19, It was already the cause of some 2.8 million annual deaths from related diseases, according to the WHO. It is estimated that around 2 billion people worldwide are overweight and some 650 million are obese. How are they different? For the first case, the body mass index (BMI) is between 25 and 30, and for the second it is greater than 30.

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