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By Nancy Lapid
October 6 (Reuters) – The following is a summary of some recent studies on COVID-19. They include research that warrants further study to corroborate the results and that has not yet been certified by peer review.
The response of chemo patients to the vaccine improves with the booster
A new study quantifies the improvement in protection against COVID-19 obtained with a third booster dose of the vaccine from Pfizer Inc and BioNTech SE in cancer patients undergoing chemotherapy. “Chemotherapy can weaken the ability of cancer patients to fight infection and respond appropriately to vaccines,” said Deepta Bhattacharya of the University of Arizona College of Medicine, co-author of the study published in Nature Medicine https : //go.nature.com / 3BdnYhH. His team studied 53 patients receiving chemotherapy for solid tumor cancers who received two injections of the vaccine. Almost all of the subjects had an immune response after vaccination. But “the magnitude of those responses was worse than in people without cancer in almost every measure we measured,” Bhattacharya said. “In all likelihood, this leaves cancer patients more susceptible to infection and COVID-19 than healthy vaccinated people. The researchers were able to bring 20 of the study participants back for a third dose of the vaccine, to see if immune responses would improve. “Antibody levels have improved in about 80% of cancer patients,” Bhattacharya said. “Our data on cancer patients support the CDC’s broad guidelines that immunocompromised people should receive a third dose of Pfizer vaccine.”
Post-COVID depression responds well to treatment
Persistent depression in COVID-19 survivors can be highly treatable, suggests a small Italian study. Doctors treated 58 patients who had developed post-COVID depression with a widely used class of antidepressants known as selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors, or SSRIs. These include sertraline, sold by Pfizer under the brand name Zoloft, Paxil (paroxetine) from GlaxoSmithKline, Prozac (fluoxetine) from Eli Lilly and Co and Celexa (citalopram) from AbbVie’s Allergan unit. . Usually about 66% of patients see improvement with SSRIs, but among those with post-COVID-19 depression, 91% responded to treatment within four weeks, researchers reported this week https://bit.ly / 3uOZdG1 at the European College of Neuropsychopharmacology Meeting in Lisbon. They speculate that depression after COVID-19 is linked to inflammation caused by the coronavirus, and note that SSRIs have anti-inflammatory and antiviral properties. Dr Livia De Picker of the University of Antwerp in Belgium, who was not involved in the study, said in a statement that the results are particularly important for survivors with the persistent symptom syndrome known as of Long COVID, which often includes depression. A separate study https://bit.ly/3Bmrgzd presented at the meeting found that while SSRIs relieved depression in COVID-19 survivors, drugs had less of an effect on their anxiety levels.
Similar viral loads in vaccinated and unvaccinated patients
Vaccinated people should continue to wear masks in public because they can still carry – and possibly shed – as much virus as unvaccinated people and not realize it, data from a new study confirms. The researchers studied the viral levels at the time of diagnosis in 869 patients, including 632 who were asymptomatic. Most infections have been caused by the highly contagious Delta variant of the coronavirus. They found no statistically significant difference in mean viral loads between vaccinated and unvaccinated individuals, or between those with or without symptoms, or between different age groups, sexes or vaccine types, according to a report published on medRxiv https://bit.ly / 3uLNecz Tuesday before peer review. “Our study does not provide information on infectivity,” said Richard Michelmore of the University of California at Davis, noting that the transmission of the virus is influenced by several factors, not just vaccine status and viral load. “It is not acceptable to assume that because you are vaccinated you cannot be infected and cannot infect someone else, even if they are asymptomatic,” he said. COVID-19 vaccines decrease the risk of infection and reduce the severity of infection. However, people vaccinated against COVID-19 should always wear masks in public as they could infect others if they themselves were infected, the researchers advised.
Click for a Reuters graphic https://tmsnrt.rs/3c7R3Bl on vaccines in development.
(Reporting by Nancy Lapid; Editing by Bill Berkrot)
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