COVID-19 Pandemic: Is Chronic Inflammation a Major Cause of Death?

  1. Albina Tskhay
  2. Alena Yezhova
  3. Kenneth Alibek

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Abstract

Background

Today humanity is facing another infectious threat: a newly emerging virus SARS-CoV-2 causing COVID-19. It was already described that COVID-19 mortality among elderly people and people with such underlying conditions as obesity, cardiovascular diseases, cancer, chronic respiratory diseases, and diabetes s increased. Dysregulation of the immune responses vital for antiviral defense, which are typical for chronic inflammation, led us to a hypothesis that chronic inflammation is the main risk factor for increased susceptibility and mortality from COVID-19.

Method

Based on the available information for 126 countries, statistical analysis to find out whether the difference in incidence and mortality within countries can be explained by the existing chronic inflammation among the countries’ population, was conducted.

Results

A positive correlation between the percentage of people dying from chronic noncommunicable diseases and COVID-19 incidence (p<0.001) and mortality (p<0.001) within countries.

Conclusion

The problem of COVID-19-caused high mortality rate may be a consequence of the high number of people having chronic low-grade inflammation as a precondition, and thus, one of the potential ways to reduce risk of morbidity and mortality is to focus on this widespread health problem, mainly occurring in developed countries and to take corresponding diagnostic, preventative, and treatment measures.

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  1. ScreenIT

    SciScore for 10.1101/2020.05.12.20099572: (What is this?)

    Please note, not all rigor criteria are appropriate for all manuscripts.

    Table 1: Rigor

    Institutional Review Board Statementnot detected.
    Randomizationnot detected.
    Blindingnot detected.
    Power Analysisnot detected.
    Sex as a biological variablenot detected.

    Table 2: Resources

    No key resources detected.

    Results from OddPub: We did not detect open data. We also did not detect open code. Researchers are encouraged to share open data when possible (see Nature blog).

    Results from LimitationRecognizer: An explicit section about the limitations of the techniques employed in this study was not found. We encourage authors to address study limitations.

    Results from TrialIdentifier: No clinical trial numbers were referenced.

    Results from Barzooka: We did not find any issues relating to the usage of bar graphs.

    Results from JetFighter: We did not find any issues relating to colormaps.

    Results from rtransparent:
    • Thank you for including a conflict of interest statement. Authors are encouraged to include this statement when submitting to a journal.
    • Thank you for including a funding statement. Authors are encouraged to include this statement when submitting to a journal.
    • No protocol registration statement was detected.

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  2. Version published to 10.1101/2020.05.12.20099572v1 on medRxiv