(Press-News.org) People who received a flu shot last flu season were significantly less likely to test positive for a COVID-19 infection when the pandemic hit, according to a new study. And those who did test positive for COVID-19 had fewer complications if they received their flu shot.
These new findings mean senior author Marion Hofmann Bowman, M.D., is continuing to recommend the flu shot to her patients even as the flu season may be winding down.
"It's particularly relevant for vaccine hesitance, and maybe taking the flu shot this year can ease some angst about the new COVID-19 vaccine," says Hofmann, an associate professor of internal medicine and a cardiologist at the Michigan Medicine Frankel Cardiovascular Center. Michigan Medicine is the academic medical center of the University of Michigan.
Researchers reviewed medical charts for more than 27,000 patients who were tested for a COVID-19 infection at Michigan Medicine between March and mid-July of 2020. Of the nearly 13,000 who got a flu shot in the previous year, 4% tested positive for COVID-19. Of the 14,000 who hadn't gotten a flu shot, nearly 5% tested positive for COVID-19. The association remained significant after controlling for other variables including ethnicity, race, gender, age, BMI, smoking status and many comorbid conditions, Hofmann says.
People who received their flu shot were also significantly less likely to require hospitalization, although the researchers didn't find a significant difference in mortality between the two groups. No one in the study tested positive for both infections at the same time.
The underlying mechanism behind the association isn't yet clear, Hofmann says.
"It is possible that patients who receive their flu vaccine are also people who are practicing more social distancing and following CDC guidelines. However, it is also plausible that there could be a direct biological effect of the flu vaccine on the immune system relevant for the fight against SARS-CoV-2 virus," she says.
Prospective longitudinal studies to examine the effect of the flu vaccine on respiratory illness are ongoing, including the Household Influenza Vaccine Evaluation (HIVE) study through the University of Michigan's School of Public Health.
"It's powerful to give providers another tool to encourage their patients to take advantage of available, effective, safe immunizations," says co-first author Carmel Ashur, M.D., M.S., an assistant professor of internal medicine and a hospitalist at Michigan Medicine.
Months ago, Hofmann was concerned about misinformation she kept seeing online that connected the flu vaccine with a COVID-19 infection. Prominent media outlets like Reuters debunked this theory, and she knew her team's data could also help address vaccine hesitancy.
"Instead of a concerning connection between COVID-19 and the flu shot, our publication provides more confidence that getting your flu shot is associated with staying out of the hospital for COVID-19," she says.
Before the pandemic hit, Hofmann and co-first author Anna Conlon, Ph.D., a U-M Medical School student, educated Frankel CVC patients about another encouraging association with the flu vaccine: cardiovascular protective effects.
"There's robust data that the flu shot prevents heart attack and hospitalizations for heart failure, which is an additional reason to get your vaccine every flu season," Conlon says.
INFORMATION:
While COVID-19 cases may be on the decline, the virus is still prevalent nationwide, and higher education institutions need to prepare for a successful 2021 academic year. New research from Clemson University in The Lancet Child & Adolescent Health, one of the world's premier peer-reviewed general medical journals, indicates how surveillance-based informative testing (SBIT) mitigates the spread of COVID-19 on campus, paving the way for other institutions, even those without the infrastructure or funding for mass-scale testing.
SBIT was implemented during the first two weeks of the Fall semester at Clemson. According to the study, ...
Another step towards understanding Alzheimer's disease has been taken at the Maisonneuve-Rosemont Hospital Research Centre. Molecular biologist Gilbert Bernier, and professor of neurosciences at Université de Montréal, has discovered a new function for the BMI1 gene, which is known to inhibit brain aging. The results of his work have just been published in Nature Communications.
In his laboratory, Bernier was able to establish that BMI1 was required to prevent the DNA of neurons from disorganizing in a particular way called G4 structures. This phenomenon occurs in the brains of people with Alzheimer's disease, but not in healthy elderly ...
Scientists have found new, unexpected behaviors when SARS-CoV-2 - the virus that causes COVID-19 - encounters drugs known as inhibitors, which bind to certain components of the virus and block its ability to reproduce.
Published in the Journal of Medicinal Chemistry, the research provides key insights for advancing drug design and drug repurposing efforts to treat COVID-19.
Researchers at the Department of Energy's Oak Ridge National Laboratory used neutron scattering to investigate interactions between telaprevir, a drug used to treat hepatitis C viral infection, and the SARS-CoV-2 main protease, the enzyme responsible for enabling the virus to reproduce.
They ...
When the human immunodeficiency virus infects cells, it can either exploit the cells to start making more copies of itself or remain dormant--a phenomenon called latency. Keeping these reservoirs latent is a challenge. A new paper, published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, has found a way to look for chemicals that can keep the virus suppressed into its dormant state.
"The current drug treatments block healthy cells from becoming infected by the virus," said Yiyang Lu, a PhD student in the Dar lab at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. "The latent reservoir poses a bigger problem because it can start producing the virus at any time. Consequently, patients have to remain on antiretroviral therapy all their lives to prevent ...
Boston - Wearing masks and physical distancing - two key infection prevention strategies implemented to stop the spread of COVID-19 - may have led to the dramatic decrease in rates of common respiratory viral infections, such as influenza. A study led by researchers at Boston Medical Center (BMC) showed an approximately 80 percent reduction in cases of influenza and other common viral respiratory infections when compared to similar time periods in previous years, before wearing masks, physical distancing, and school closures were implemented to help stop the spread of COVID-19. Published online in Open Forum Infectious ...
SAN ANTONIO (March 23, 2021) -- More than half of all health care workers worldwide are experiencing burnout that, if not addressed, could cause many to leave their fields in favor of less-stressful occupations or choose early retirement. And the COVID-19 pandemic has only made it worse.
That's the warning of a surgeon from The University of Texas Health Science Center at San Antonio in a letter and a call for global action published March 22 in the Lancet journal EClinicalMedicine.
"A recent survey done in Medscape of nearly 7,500 physicians globally showed that burnout has reached a very high rate," said END ...
By targeting an enzyme that plays a key role in head and neck cancer cells, researchers from the UCLA School of Dentistry were able to significantly slow the growth and spread of tumors in mice and enhance the effectiveness of an immunotherapy to which these types of cancers often become resistant.
Their findings, END ...
Researchers have succeeded in revealing the arsenal used by protozoans of the genus Leishmania in human cells to make leishmaniasis more severe, especially in cases of the mucocutaneous variety of the disease, which can cause deformations in patients. The discovery points the way to a search for novel treatments for the disease as well as casting light on a key mechanism involved in other diseases.
The mechanism involves Leishmania, macrophages and a virus that lives endosymbiotically in the parasite and is known as the Leishmania RNA virus (LRV). According to a study published in the journal iScience, the parasite inhibits activation of caspase-11 via LRV-induced autophagy. Caspases are a family of enzymes that ...
A pilot study from North Carolina State University and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill has found evidence of Bartonella infection in the blood of people with schizophrenia and schizoaffective disorder.
"Researchers have been looking at the connection between bacterial infection and neuropsychiatric disease for some time," says Dr. Erin Lashnits, a former veterinary internist at NC State, current faculty member at the University of Wisconsin and first author of the study.
"Specifically, there has been research suggesting that cat ownership is associated with schizophrenia ...
Concern over attractiveness to the opposite sex affects the masculine image of physics and mathematics only in England, while having a negative view of intellectual women is correlated with a masculine image of mathematics as a field only in Japan, according to a survey conducted in the two countries by a Japanese research group. This comparative study shows that programs to increase women's representation in these fields must take into account each country's social context surrounding gender roles.
Why do so few women choose to study and work in STEM (science, technology, ...
