THURSDAY, April 30, 2020 (HealthDay News) -- For patients with COVID-19, male gender is associated with worse outcomes, independent of age, according to a study published online April 29 in Frontiers in Public Health.
Jian-Min Jin, from Capital Medical University in China, and colleagues compared COVID-19 severity and mortality between male and female patients. Data were included from a case series of 43 hospitalized patients; a public dataset of 37 fatalities and 1,019 patients who survived with COVID-19 in China; and 524 patients with severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS), including 139 deaths, from Beijing in 2003.
The researchers found that for patients with COVID-19 and SARS, older age and a high number of comorbidities were associated with higher severity and mortality. In all datasets, age was comparable for men and women. In the case series, men tended to have more serious disease than women (P = 0.035). The number of men was 2.4 times higher than the number of women in the deceased group from the public dataset (70.3 versus 29.7 percent; P = 0.016). A gender role was also observed in mortality in SARS; the percentage of men was higher in the deceased versus the survived group (P = 0.015).
"Male gender is a risk factor for worse outcomes and death independent of age and susceptibility," the authors write.
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