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Levels of covid-19 antibodies fall faster in men than in women, suggests a French study conducted at Strasbourg University hospitals. The discovery could have implications for vaccine development.
The study, which has not yet been peer-reviewed, followed 308 professionals from those hospitals diagnosed with the new coronavirus for nearly six months, most of them with mild disease. At two distinct points in time, different antibodies were measured in the body using three different tests. In the first blood sample, it was men over 50 and those with a body mass index (BMI) greater than 25 who had the highest levels of antibodies. In the second, the researchers concluded that antibody levels dropped even more in men than in women, regardless of age and BMI.
The study results show that “some serological tests are less reliable over time and suggest that the duration of protection following SARS-CoV-2 infection or vaccination will be different in women and men.”
While “other studies have shown that men have a higher antibody response than women in the acute phase, we are showing that although men have a higher response early on, the drop in their antibody levels is much faster with time, while women appear to have more stable levels, “says The Guardian newspaper Samira Fafi-Kremer, head of virology at Strasbourg University hospitals and one of the study’s authors.
The loss appears to be associated with the initial amount of antibodies. “If you have more antibodies, you will have a faster decline, but we don’t know exactly why,” adds Olivier Schwartz, another of the authors and head of the immunity and virology unit at the Pasteur Institute.
The discovery reinforces the scientific community’s appeals to researchers developing vaccines against the novel coronavirus to compare immune responses in men and women over time.
Sabra Klein, co-director of the Johns Hopkins Center for Women’s Health, Sex and Gender Research, believes it is also likely that the decline in antibodies in men will occur more rapidly than in women after vaccination. “If the functional antibody response decreases to a greater extent in men than in women after vaccination, then men may need another booster vaccine to maintain immunity,” he tells The Guardian.
Immunity to the SARS-CoV-2 virus, which causes covid-19 disease, is still far from being understood by scientists. Just this month, a study by the British Coronavirus Immunology Consortium involving 100 patients found that T cell immunity is expected to last six months in most adults after primary infection. Another survey of 185 infected people (not yet examined by experts) showed that eight months after infection, most of those who have recovered still have enough immune cells to prevent disease.
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