Men have almost three times the odds of needing admission to intensive care and 40 per cent higher odds of dying from COVID-19 than women, according to a new study led by researchers at University College London, Great Ormond Street Hospital and the University of Cape Town.
The study, published in Nature Communications and the largest review of its kind, looked at publicly available data from 92 reports across 47 countries including the UK to investigate why COVID-19 may affect genders differently.
In a meta-analysis of 3,111,714 reported global cases, researchers demonstrated that whilst there is no difference in the proportion of males and females with confirmed COVID-19, male patients have almost three times the pooled OR of requiring intensive treatment unit (ITU) admission (OR, 2.84; 95% CI, 2.06-3.92) and higher odds of death (OR, 1.39; 95% CI, 1.31-1.47) compared with females (OR: 1.91 in Scotland, 1.93 in England and 1.80 in Northern Ireland for higher odds of death).
With few exceptions, the sex bias observed in COVID-19 is a worldwide phenomenon. An appreciation of how sex is influencing COVID-19 outcomes will have important implications for clinical management and mitigation strategies for this disease, the study authors said.
They noted that sex differences in other aspects of physiology further to the immune system could also play a part in the sex bias described in this study.
The researchers acknowledged that one limitation of the study was that the data did not account for age and individual comorbidities or ethnicity, which could limit the ability to the predict the role of sex in disease severity. However, despite these limitations, they say the data highlight an important trend in the epidemiology of COVID-19, with male sex acting as a risk factor for severe disease.
