Nicotine & COVID-19
2020-04-23 20:09:29.144357+02 by Dan Lyke 0 comments
Okay, now the virus is just fucking with us: French researchers to test nicotine patches on coronavirus patients. Smokers who actually get COVID-19 still die more frequently, but they're less likely to get it...
A nicotinic hypothesis for Covid-19 with preventive and therapeutic implications
SARS-CoV-2 epidemics raises a considerable issue of public health at the planetary scale. There is a pressing urgency to find treatments based upon currently available scientific knowledge. Therefore, we tentatively propose a hypothesis which hopefully might ultimately help saving lives. Based on the current scientific literature and on new epidemiological data which reveal that current smoking status appears to be a protective factor against the infection by SARS-CoV-2 [1], we hypothesize that the nicotinic acetylcholine receptor (nAChR) plays a key role in the pathophysiology of Covid-19 infection and might represent a target for the prevention and control of Covid-19 infection.