Why are women more prone to Long Covid? (Guardian, 13 June 2021)

Summary

While men over 50 tend to suffer the most acute symptoms of coronavirus, women who get Long Covid outnumber men by as much as four to one.

Content

In June 2020, as the first reports of Long Covid began to filter through the medical community, doctors began to notice an unusual trend. While acute cases of Covid-19 – particularly those hospitalised with the disease – tended to be mostly male and over 50, long Covid sufferers were, by contrast, both relatively young and overwhelmingly female.

Over the past 12 months, a similar gender skew has become apparent around the world.

Dr Sarah Jolley, who runs the UCHealth post-Covid care clinic in Aurora, Colorado, told the Observer that about 60% of her patients have been women. In Sweden, Karolinska Institute researcher Dr Petter Brodin, who leads the Long Covid arm of the Covid Human Genetic Effort global consortium, suspects that the overall proportion of female Long Covid patients may be even higher, potentially 70-80%.

“This pattern has been seen in other post-infectious syndromes,” says Dr Melissa Heightman, who runs the UCLH post-Covid care clinic in north London.

As Heightman points out, this is not a new trend when it comes to infectious diseases, rather one which has historically been neglected. Women are known to be up to four times more likely to get ME/CFS (myalgic encephalomyelitis, or chronic fatigue syndrome), a condition believed to have infectious origins in the majority of cases, while studies have also shown that patients with chronic Lyme disease are significantly more likely to be female.

But despite this, there have been relatively few attempts to drill down into why this is the case. Instead, because these conditions predominantly affect women, they have more often been dismissed as being psychological in origin.

“In general, there’s not as much research money and attention on conditions that primarily affect women,” says Julie Nusbaum, an assistant professor at NYU Long Island School of Medicine. “That’s just a general disparity in medical research. I think certain biases persist that when women present with a lot of body aches or pains, there’s more often an emotional or personality component to it than medical origin.”