SAN FRANCISCO (KCBS RADIO) – Obesity is a major risk factor for developing severe illness from COVID-19 and – according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention – having obesity may triple the risk of hospitalization.
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"That is not because COVID is somehow causing more damage intrinsically in obese patients, but something (is going wrong) with the immune systems of obese patients," UCSF pathologist, Dr. Sagar Bapat, told KCBS Radio's "As Prescribed" on Thursday.
It is a serious concern as obesity is on the rise around the world, and projections suggest that by 2030, one in two adults in the United States will be obese. "That kind of means that the average patient will eventually be the obese patient," said Dr. Bapat. "So for us, we wanted to understand what it means to be obese immunologically."
A new study using mice with atopic dermatitis (also known as eczema) found that not only was the disease more prevalent in obese mice, but their immune response was also completely different.
"That was a big surprise because we had never really considered or thought that giving the same disease to essentially the same animal – except one is lean and one is obese – that would actually produce a switch in the immune responses of that animal," Bapat explained.
What's more, drugs usually used to treat atopic dermatitis actually made the disease worse in the obese mice.
The study gives more insight into how obese patients might be treated differently.
"Maybe it would be difficult, at the time a patient shows up to the clinic, to ask the patients to become lean again...but maybe we can ask them to be immunologically lean again by giving them a drug that helps their immune system look like a lean immune system," Bapat said.
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