Sexual Orientation Disparities In Risk Factors For Adverse COVID-19–Related Outcomes

Sexual minority individuals experience health disparities associated with sexual stigma and discrimination. Lesbian, gay, and bisexual persons in the U.S. have higher self-reported prevalence of several underlying health conditions associated with severe COVID-19 outcomes, compared to heterosexual persons, according to the February 5, 2021 issue of Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Reports. Between 2017 and 2019, sexual minorities, whether part of the overall population or among racial and ethnic minority groups, reported higher rates of asthma, chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, stroke, kidney disease, cancer and heart disease. Based on these findings, CDC indicated that including information on sexual orientation and gender identity, along with race and ethnicity, in COVID-19 data collections could improve knowledge about disparities in these communities. Current surveillance systems lack information on sexual orientation, hampering examination of COVID-19–associated disparities among sexual minority adults.

Instant Death More Common In Absence Of Physical Exercise

Heart disease is the leading cause of death globally and prevention is a major public health priority. Until recently, an aspect involving little information has been the effect of an active versus sedentary lifestyle on the immediate course of a heart attack. Now, there is evidence that an active lifestyle is linked with a lower chance of dying immediately from a heart attack based on a study published on February 12, 2021 in the European Journal of Preventive Cardiology. Researchers used data from 10 European observational cohorts including healthy participants with a baseline assessment of physical activity who had a heart attack during follow-up, a total of 28,140 individuals. While 17.7% died within 28 days of their heart attack, 62.3% of them died instantly. Patients who had engaged in moderate and high levels of leisure-time physical activity had a 33% and 45% lower risk of instant death compared to sedentary individuals. These numbers were 36% and 28%, respectively at 28 days.

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Identifying Candidates For Drug Repurposing For SARS-CoV-2

When COVID-19 arrived, researchers began seeking effective treatments, but producing new drugs can be a lengthy process. The only expedient option may be to repurpose existing medications. As reported on February 15, 2021 in the journal Nature Communications, a team from MIT's Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, the Institute for Data, Systems and Society, and the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard developed a machine learning-based approach to identify drugs already on the market that potentially could be repurposed to fight COVID-19, particularly in the elderly. Given that SARS-CoV-2 pathogenicity is highly age-dependent, it is critical to integrate aging signatures into drug discovery platforms. To identify robust druggable protein targets, researchers propose a principled causal framework that makes use of multiple data modalities. The investigators pinpointed the protein RIPK1 as a promising target for COVID-19 drugs, and they identified three approved drugs that act on the expression of RIPK1.

Affordable CRISPR App Reveals Unintended Mutations At Site Of CRISPR Gene Repair

Scientists have developed an affordable, downloadable app that scans for potential unintended mistakes when CRISPR (Clustered Regularly Interspaced Short Palindromic Repeats) is used to repair mutations that cause disease. During CRISPR-directed gene editing, multiple gene repair mechanisms interact to produce a wide and largely unpredictable variety of sequence changes across an edited population of cells. Shortcomings inherent to previously available proposal-based insertion and deletion (indel) analysis software necessitated the development of a more comprehensive tool that could detect a larger range and variety of indels while maintaining the ease of use of tools currently available. As reported on February 10, 2021 in The CRISPR Journal, researchers developed Deconvolution of Complex DNA Repair (DECODR) to determine the identities and positions of inserted and deleted bases in DNA extracts from both clonally expanded and bulk cell populations. The software is accurate in making these determinations.

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