New Delhi:

Men are disproportionately affected by conditions and events leading to early death, including COVID-19, heart disease, and road injuries, while women suffer from higher levels of non-fatal illnesses such as mental health conditions and headaches, a new global research published in The Lancet Public Health journal has found.

The findings highlighted the diverse and evolving health needs of men and women at different stages of their lives, said researchers who analysed disparities in the 20 leading causes of disease risking populations across ages and regions between 1990 and 2021.

The authors found that men lost 45 per cent more life years from COVID-19 than women.

“Overall COVID-19 was the leading cause of health loss in 2021, with males experiencing 45 per cent more health loss from COVID-19 than females (3,978 vs 2,211 age-standardised Disability-Adjusted Life Years per 100,000),” the authors wrote.

The researchers also found that the greatest sex-based gap in health loss that disadvantaged women was for low back pain, with the gap being the most pronounced in South Asia, followed by Central Europe, Eastern Europe, and Central Asia.

The health differences appear in teenage and continue to grow with age, with women enduring higher levels of illness and disability their entire lives, as they tend to live longer than men, they found.

The authors said that progress towards an equitable, healthy future should involve “concerted, sex- and gender-informed strategies” which recognise the unique challenges that men and women face in their lives.

They called for countries to strengthen their reporting of sex and gender data, and use them to overhaul their approach to health.

The modelling research uses data from the Global Burden of Disease Study 2021 to compare number of life years lost to illness and premature death in the past 30 years.

“The timing is right for this study and call to action — not only because of where the evidence is now, but because COVID-19 has starkly reminded us that sex differences can profoundly impact health outcomes,” said senior author Luisa Sorio Flor at the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation (IHME), University of Washington, US. IHME coordinated the study.

While COVID-19 disproportionately affected men across all regions, the widest sex-based difference was observed in the sub-Saharan Africa, and the Latin America and the Caribbean regions, the authors said. Cardiovascular disease and road injuries were found to be other important conditions resulting in premature deaths.

Women around the world were also found to be disproportionately impacted by mental health conditions. Life years lost to depressive disorders were found to be over a third higher among women than men. The widest sex-based gaps affecting women were observed in high-income countries, and those in Latin America and the Caribbean countries.
 

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New Delhi:

Researchers have examined a man in Germany who claims to have received 217 vaccinations against COVID-19 and found that his immune system was fully functional.

Until now, it has been unclear what effects hypervaccination such as this would have on the immune system. Some scientists were of the opinion that immune cells would become less effective after becoming used to the antigens.

However, the case study published in The Lancet Infectious Diseases journal found that the immune system of the person is fully functional.

More than 60 million people in Germany have been vaccinated against SARS-CoV-2, a majority of them several times, the researchers said.

The man examined by a team at Friedrich-Alexander University Erlangen-Nurnberg (FAU) in Germany claims to have received 217 vaccinations for private reasons. There is official confirmation for 134 of these vaccinations, they said.

“We learned about his case via newspaper articles,” said Kilian Schober from FAU.

“We then contacted him and invited him to undergo various tests in Erlangen (a city in Germany). He was very interested in doing so,” he said.

Vaccinations contain parts of the pathogen or a type of construction plan that the vaccinated person’s cells can use to produce these pathogenic components themselves.

Thanks to these antigens, the immune system learns to recognise the real pathogen in the event of a later infection. It can then react more rapidly and forcibly.

The researchers wanted to analyse what happens if the body’s immune system is exposed extremely often to a specific antigen.

“That may be the case in a chronic infection such as HIV or hepatitis B, that has regular flare-ups,” explained Schober.

“There is an indication that certain types of immune cells, known as T-cells, then become fatigued, leading to them releasing fewer pro-inflammatory messenger substances,” he added.

This and other effects triggered by the cells becoming used to the antigens can weaken the immune system, which is then no longer able to combat the pathogen so effectively.

However, the study does not deliver any indication that this is the case, the researchers said.

“We were also able to take blood samples ourselves when the man received a further vaccination during the study at his own insistence. We were able to use these samples to determine exactly how the immune system reacts to the vaccination,” Schober said.

The results showed that the individual has large numbers of T-effector cells against SARS-CoV-2. These act as the body’s own soldiers that fight against the virus, the researchers said.

The person even had more of these compared to the control group of people who had received three vaccinations, they said.

The researchers did not perceive any fatigue in these effector cells. They were similarly effective as those in the control group who had received the normal number of vaccinations.

They also explored memory T cells — cells at a preliminary stage, similar to stem cells, that can replenish numbers of suitable effector cells.

“The number of memory cells was just as high in our test case as in the control group,” explained Katharina Kocher, one of the leading authors of the study.

“Overall, we did not find any indication for a weaker immune response, rather the contrary,” Kocher added.
 

(Except for the headline, this story has not been edited by NDTV staff and is published from a syndicated feed.)

New Delhi:

Drugs to treat common infections in children and babies are no longer effective in large parts of the world, including India, due to high rates of antibiotic resistance, a study has found.

The team led by researchers at the University of Sydney in Australia found many antibiotics recommended by the World Health Organization (WHO) had less than 50 per cent effectiveness in treating childhood infections such as pneumonia, sepsis (bloodstream infections) and meningitis.

The findings, published in The Lancet regional Health-Southeast Asia journal, show global guidelines on antibiotic use are outdated and need updates.

The most seriously affected regions are in Southeast Asia and the Pacific where thousands of unnecessary deaths in children resulting from antibiotic resistance occur each year, the researchers said.

The WHO has declared that antimicrobial resistance (AMR) is one of the top 10 global public health threats facing humanity. In newborns, an estimated three million cases of sepsis occur globally each year, with up to 570,000 (5.7 lakh) deaths.

Many of these are due to lack of effective antibiotics to treat resistant bacteria.

The study adds to mounting evidence that common bacteria responsible for sepsis and meningitis in children are often resistant to prescribed antibiotics.

The research shows the urgent need for global antibiotic guidelines to be updated, to reflect the rapidly evolving rates of AMR. The most recent guidelines from the WHO were published in 2013.

The study found that one antibiotic in particular, ceftriaxone, was likely to be effective in treating only one in three cases of sepsis or meningitis in newborn babies.

Another antibiotic, gentamicin, was found likely to be effective in treating fewer than half of all sepsis and meningitis cases in children, according to the researchers.

Gentamicin is commonly prescribed alongside aminopenicillins, which the study showed also has low effectiveness in combating bloodstream infections in babies and children.

“Antibiotic resistance is rising more rapidly than we realize,” said study lead author Phoebe Williams from the University of Sydney.

“We urgently need new solutions to stop invasive multidrug-resistant infections and the needless deaths of thousands of children each year,” Williams said.

The study analysed 6,648 bacterial isolates from 11 countries across 86 publications to review antibiotic susceptibility for common bacteria causing childhood infections.

The data collated largely arose from urban tertiary hospital settings with over-representation from particular countries, especially India and China.

Williams said that the best way to tackle antibiotic resistance in childhood infections is to make funding to investigate new antibiotic treatments for children and newborns a priority.

“Antibiotic clinical focus on adults and too often children and newborns are left out. That means we have very limited options and data for new treatments,” she noted.

“This study reveals important problems regarding the availability of effective antibiotics to treat serious infections in children,” said study senior author Paul Turner, a professor at the University of Oxford, UK.

“It also highlights the ongoing need for high quality laboratory data to monitor the AMR situation, which will facilitate timely changes to be made to treatment guidelines,” Turner added.
 

(Except for the headline, this story has not been edited by NDTV staff and is published from a syndicated feed.)

Cases of death by suicide among Indian men have grown over one-third in the past seven years, claimed a report by The Lancet Regional Health. In 2014, 89,129 men died by suicide as against 42,521 women. The ratio rose to 2.64 times in 2021. This year, 1,18,979 males died by suicide against 45,026 females.

The situation was even more concerning among married men. In 2021, married men recorded triple the suicide death rate — deaths per one lakh people– of 24.3 compared to women where this figure was 8.4.

The study on changing patterns of suicide in India pointed out that family problems and health issues were two major factors behind the rising vulnerability of Indian men to suicide.  Low suicide among women might indicate better coping mechanisms for dealing with stress.

 “Owing to these two reasons, the male-to-female ratio of suicides has increased from 1.9 and 2.5 to 2.4 and 3.2, respectively, during 2014–2021. There was a 107.5% increase in citing family problems as a reason among men during 2014–2021, approximately two-fold of that in women,” the report said.

The findings of the study are based on data from the National Crime Records Bureau.

The suicide death rate remained the highest — 27.2 — among men between the age group of 30-44 years. The SDR spiked nearly 5 points from 22.7 in 2014 to 27.2 in 2021. Between the age group of 18-29 years, the suicide rate saw a steeper rise of 5.6 points from 20 in 2014 to 25.6 in 2021. 

Overall, the cases of suicide death among Indian men between 2014 to 2021 grew by 33.5 per cent compared to women where the change was 5.89 per cent.

Among social groups, daily wage workers were at a greater risk of death by suicide. The instances of suicide had nearly tripled between 2014 and 2021. From 13,944 in 2014, cases of death by suicide rose to 37, 751 in 2021 among men involved in daily wage work. In women, the number showed a similar alarming trend– rising from 1,791 in 2014 to 4,246 in 2021.

The report further revealed unemployed men and women both had a high SDR of 48.2 and 27.8, respectively, in 2021.