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16.07.2021

Indeed, zinc protects against corona

Yesterday we wrote about a 2020 study from India, in which a good zinc status improved the prospects of people with a corona infection. In 2021, Spanish researchers published a similar study, confirming the findings from India in detail.

Study
Spanish doctors, affiliated with Hospital del Mar in Barcelona, studied 249 corona patients aged 54-75 who had to stay in the hospital for more than 48 hours, and were admitted for a month in the spring of 2020. They determined their zinc status, and then looked at the course of the disease.

Results
About a quarter of the patients had less than 50 micrograms/dl of zinc in the blood. That's low.

A healthy zinc level is somewhere between 70 and 110, we read on the Mayo Clinic website. About half of the study participants had a zinc level below this range.

The patients with abnormally low zinc levels of less than 50 micrograms of zinc were hospitalized for 25 days. In this group, 21 percent died.

The study participants with a zinc status of over 50 stayed in the hospital for only 8 days. In this group 'only' 5 percent of the study participants died.

When the researchers smoothed out the effect of other factors as best they could, they were able to calculate that an adequate zinc status reduced the risk of death from corona by a factor of 3.2.

Mechanism
It is probably not the virus itself that is causing so many problems in hospitals. It is mainly the body's out-of-control inflammatory response in some patients that damages vital tissues.

The researchers found that an adequate zinc status reduces the production of proteins that stimulate inflammatory reactions, such as CRP and Interleukin-6.

But that's not the whole story. When the researchers in their lab released the coronavirus on kidney cells in a test tube, they saw that the virus could not multiply as well as the cells contained more zinc.

Conclusion
"This work aims to focus clinical attention on serum zinc content in COVID-19 patients", summarize the researchers. "It is then urgent to start clinical trials supplementing patients with low serum zinc association at admission with zinc to reestablish zinc homeostasis."

"It should be also recommended to promote zinc supplementation programs targeted to people at risk of zinc deficiency, such as the elderly, in order to reduce COVID-19's severity."

Source:
Nutrients. 2021 Feb 9;13(2):562.

More:
Preventing zinc deficiency, preventing (or surviving) covid 15.07.2021

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