{"id":1739,"date":"2020-05-11T11:28:39","date_gmt":"2020-05-11T10:28:39","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.balance-menopause.com\/?p=1739"},"modified":"2021-10-07T11:30:16","modified_gmt":"2021-10-07T10:30:16","slug":"menopausal-women-taking-hrt-may-have-increased-protection-from-covid-19","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.balance-menopause.com\/news\/menopausal-women-taking-hrt-may-have-increased-protection-from-covid-19\/","title":{"rendered":"Menopausal women taking HRT may have increased protection from COVID-19"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<p><strong>Published:<\/strong>&nbsp;11th May 2020<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Dr Louise Newson is working closely with NHS England and Professor Tim Spector\u2019s team to assess the potential effects of oestrogen on reducing the severity and mortality from COVID-19. Many studies have shown that COVID-19 affects men more than women and we have also seen that, in women, the increased risk with age starts to become appreciable earlier than in men &#8211; this change appears to happen in the late 50s. We are currently taking a closer look to see whether this is related to the menopause.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p><strong><a href=\"https:\/\/covid.joinzoe.com\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">The COVID Symptom Study<\/a><\/strong>&nbsp;is working to facilitate key research into the potential protective effects of hormonal therapies, like HRT or the pill, and COVID-19. Dr Newson and Professor Tim Spector recently&nbsp;recorded a webinar on oestrogen and COVID-19 which is available to&nbsp;<strong><a href=\"https:\/\/covid.joinzoe.com\/post\/webinars\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">view here<\/a><\/strong>. More than 3 million people in the UK have provided data via the COVID Symptom Study app, launched by researchers at King\u2019s College London and health technology company ZOE. This is the largest group of participants contributing to COVID-19 research in the world. Unlike contact tracing apps, The COVID Symptom Study app focuses on gathering health data to advance research into understanding the disease and providing short and long-term clinical solutions for the Nation\u2019s recovery. The COVID Symptom Study is an amazing resource that can answer a powerful question about the role of hormones in COVID-19 in a matter of days, which in turn can help the NHS save lives.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>The COVID Symptom Study app has been updated to include specific questions about periods, hormone medications and menopause with the aim to better understand how hormones such as oestrogen might influence COVID-19 outcomes. The data will shed more light on the underlying reasons why there are sex-based differences in the response to coronavirus infection and the role of hormones in the disease as demonstrated in COVID Symptom Study data on hospitalisation.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Dr Newson is also collaborating with researchers at the&nbsp;<strong><a href=\"https:\/\/www.liverpool.ac.uk\/centre-of-excellence-infectious-diseases-research\/covid-19\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">University of Liverpool<\/a><\/strong>&nbsp;and a wider volunteer-force of around 600 front-line public health teams and researchers (CIPHA: Combined Intelligence for Public Health Action) looking at data from multiple sources to tackle COVID-19. Experts in infectious diseases, clinical pharmacology and public health are helping to explore the role of oestrogens in COVID-19 with data from&nbsp;<strong><a href=\"https:\/\/covid.joinzoe.com\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">COVID-19-specific apps<\/a>,&nbsp;<a href=\"https:\/\/www.evergreen-life.co.uk\/covid-19-heat-map\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">GP-record-access apps asking questions about COVID-19 symptoms<\/a><\/strong>&nbsp;and anonymised NHS data linked to COVID-19 monitoring systems such as&nbsp;<strong><a href=\"https:\/\/isaric4c.net\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">ISARIC 4C<\/a><\/strong>. By understanding the differences between men, pre-menopausal and post-menopausal women in their risks of developing COVID-19 and suffering severe consequences \u2013 and how HRT and other medicines affect this \u2013 we hope to provide evidence for policy-makers and advance scientific understanding of sex hormones in infectious disease responses.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Dr Newson spoke to BBC News about her work with Zoe and&nbsp;The COVID Symptom Study. Watch the full interview here:<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Published:&nbsp;11th May 2020 Dr Louise Newson is working closely with NHS England [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":18,"featured_media":1193,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1739","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-uncategorised"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.balance-menopause.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1739","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.balance-menopause.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.balance-menopause.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.balance-menopause.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/18"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.balance-menopause.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1739"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/www.balance-menopause.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1739\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1745,"href":"https:\/\/www.balance-menopause.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1739\/revisions\/1745"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.balance-menopause.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/1193"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.balance-menopause.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1739"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.balance-menopause.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1739"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.balance-menopause.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1739"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}