Published in Cell Metabolism
Diabetes and obesity are associated with greater COVID-19 severity, and certain racial and ethnic groups bear a disproportionate burden of these metabolic diseases. There is a need to focus on SDOH and truly understand how these factors adversely affect an individual’s health and contribute to increasing prevalence of metabolic diseases.
Published in Cell Metabolism
Neutrophils are required to meet their energy demands at inflamed sites where nutrients may be limited. Sadiku et al. provide evidence of a specialized metabolism that enables neutrophils to utilize glycogen cycling for energy production. This is essential for neutrophil function and survival, and dysregulation is associated with chronic disease st...
Published in Cell Metabolism
COVID-19 infection produces excess mortality in people with obesity or diabetes. Here we review the epidemiology, susceptibility to infection, pathophysiology, immunology, complications, potential therapeutic options, and response to vaccinations in people with metabolic disorders and SARS-CoV-2 infection.
Published in Cell Metabolism
While corticosteroid therapy is effective in the treatment of patients with severe COVID-19, a quantitative clinical parameter to identify such severity and which patients would respond well to corticosteroids has not been developed. Here, Cai et al. find that a simple blood test that measures the neutrophil-to-leukocyte ratio at admission discrimi...
Published in Cell metabolism
Patients with a metabolic syndrome (overweight, diabetes, hypertension, and dyslipidemia) have a particularly bad outcome if infected with SARS-CoV-2. Yu et al. (2020) suggest that insulin therapy itself may promote fatality in patients with COVID-19 and diabetes. Copyright © 2020 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
Published in Cell Metabolism
Corrado et al. show that the mitochondrial membrane-specific lipid cardiolipin is required for the metabolic plasticity that is essential for effective CD8+ T cell function. Cardiolipin-deficient CD8+ T cells fail to respond to pathogens and are not able to adapt to nutrient stress.
Published in Cellular Physiology and Biochemistry
Background/Aims: In addition to their action of lowering blood cholesterol levels, statins modulate biological characteristics and functions of arterial myocytes such as viability, proliferation, apoptosis, survival and contraction. The present study tested whether simvastatin, as a prototype statin, enhances autophagy in coronary arterial myocytes...
Published in Cell Metabolism
Type 2 diabetes (T2D) is associated with poor outcome for patients with COVID-19. Here, Yu et al. demonstrated that among 689 patients with T2D from a cohort of 3,305 hospitalized COVID-19 cases, insulin treatment was associated with a significant increase in death rate in patients with COVID-19 and T2D.
Published in Cell Metabolism
Kusmartseva et al. demonstrate preferential ACE2 expression in pancreatic microvascular and ductal structures, suggesting these constitute a more likely target than islet endocrine cells in SARS-CoV-2 infection. This notion was supported by detection of SARS-CoV-2 nucleocapsid protein in ductal epithelium, but not endocrine cells, of pancreata from...
Published in Cell Metabolism
Coate et al. examined expression of canonical SARS-CoV-2 entry proteins ACE2 and TMPRSS2 in the human pancreas and report ACE2 expression in the microvasculature, including islet pericytes, whereas both ACE2 and TMPRSS2 are expressed in some ducts. Conversely, neither protein is detected in β cells, arguing against direct β cell viral infection in ...
