Diseases like Lupus involve mistakes where one’s immune system makes antibodies that wrongly attack normal human tissues. These are called “auto-antibodies.”
New research indicates in Covid-19 the sickest patients who eventually die might have auto-antibodies against “interferons” which are normal human proteins that fight viral infections.
In yet another unexpected finding, 94% of patients in the study with these autoantibodies were men. About 12.5% of men with life-threatening COVID pneumonia had autoantibodies against interferon, compared with 2.6% of women.
That was unexpected, given that autoimmune disease is far more common in women, Klein said.
“I’ve been studying sex differences in viral infections for 22 years, and I don’t think anybody who studies autoantibodies thought this would be a risk factor for COVID-19,” Klein said.
The study might help explain why men are more likely than women to become critically ill with COVID-19 and die, Klein said. ...snip... Akiko Iwasaki, a professor of immunobiology at the Yale School of Medicine, noted that several genes involved in the immune system’s response to viruses are on the X chromosome.
Women have two copies of this chromosome — along with two copies of each gene. That gives women a backup in case one copy of a gene becomes defective, Iwasaki said.
Men, however, have only one copy of the X chromosome. So if there is a defect or harmful gene on the X chromosome, they have no other copy of that gene to correct the problem, Iwasaki said.
[censored] noted that one woman in the study who developed autoantibodies has a rare genetic condition in which she has only one X chromosome.
