Green Tea Catechins Against COVID-19: Lower COVID-19 Morbidity and Mortality in Countries with Higher per capita Green Tea Consumption
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Abstract
Several vaccines are currently validated for COVID-19 prevention and mass vaccination has already been started in many countries. Nevertheless, it is likely that the development of an efficient therapy that reduces COVID-19 severity/mortality would be still important for a rather prolonged time, in particular, due to new variants of SARS-CoV-2. Several lines of emerging evidence suggest that green tea catechins such as epigallocatechin-3-gallate have direct anti-viral activity and affect factors associated with COVID-19 severity.
Objective:
Considering that green tea catechins are major constituents of green tea, it may be expected that countries with higher per capita green tea consumption would be less affected by COVID-19. This study assessed this possibility.
Methods:
Among countries with a population of at least 3 million (n=134), those with relatively high (above 150 g) per capita green tea consumption have been identified (n=21); (ii) normalized to population values of COVID-19 cases (morbidity) and deaths (mortality) for groups of countries with high and low per capita green tea consumption were compared.
Results:
Striking differences in COVID-19 morbidity and mortality between groups of countries with ‘high’ and ‘low’ green tea consumption were found. The differences were still observed after the adjustment for the onset of the disease. An analysis using the multiple linear regression approach suggests that the associations are present at the level of individual countries.
Conclusions:
Results of this study, taken together with emerging pharmacological evidence, suggest that green tea catechins can give valuable clues for the treatment/amelioration of COVID-19.
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SciScore for 10.1101/2020.10.23.20218479: (What is this?)
Please note, not all rigor criteria are appropriate for all manuscripts.
Table 1: Rigor
NIH rigor criteria are not applicable to paper type.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: We detected the following sentences addressing limitations in the study:Limitations of the study and potential future directions: For most of the countries green tea consumption was estimated based on the annual balance between its import and export. Although this approach is used for coarse estimates [22], apparently, it has several limitations as outlined in Methods. Thus, the list of countries with ‘high’ …
SciScore for 10.1101/2020.10.23.20218479: (What is this?)
Please note, not all rigor criteria are appropriate for all manuscripts.
Table 1: Rigor
NIH rigor criteria are not applicable to paper type.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: We detected the following sentences addressing limitations in the study:Limitations of the study and potential future directions: For most of the countries green tea consumption was estimated based on the annual balance between its import and export. Although this approach is used for coarse estimates [22], apparently, it has several limitations as outlined in Methods. Thus, the list of countries with ‘high’ green tea consumption should be considered as a tentative. It cannot be excluded that some countries with considerable green tea per/capita consumption have not been identified among those producing green tea (for instance, Myanmar, South Korea, Papua New Guinea). It would be of interest to obtain relevant information in regard of these countries, include it in the analysis and check how this would affect associations considered in this work. Other limitations include multiple factors that may differentially affect COVID-19 morbidity and mortality in distinct countries. For instance: the administrative strategies to prevent transmission; population density, percentage of urban population, percentage of older population; condition-specific mortality risks; TB infection and BCG vaccination [25,27, 38]. Potential role of only some of these factors was assessed in this study. On the other hand, potential confounding factors included in the linear regression model in this study represent the majority of these identified as consistent (and at the same time relatively independent) in relation to COVID-19 in previous studies [25, 32]. Additionally, i...
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.
- Thank you for including a protocol registration statement.
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