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Comment by m0zg | Hacker News Reader

You're one step away from committing the cardinal sin of HN wrongthink by mentioning that hydroxychloroquine is a zinc ionophore. At which point you will be downvoted to hell (just like this post) because orange man bad.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4182877/

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I do not think I will be here long. It is even worse than it has been in academia.

I will share this with you, I do not think hydroxychloroquine is needed, only high dose zinc. It is looking more like lower ACE2 activity is causing the majority of issues. Since ACE2 needs zinc as a cofactor, well...

https://www.radboudumc.nl/en/nieuws/2020/radboudumc-research...

"Covid-19 enters the lungs via the ACE2 receptor. The virus binds to the receptor, which then pulls it into the lung cell where the virus can multiply. In case of a massive infection, this process makes the ACE2 receptors disappear from the outside of the cell. With that, their function also disappears."

Can you share what's a high dose in this case, how many milligrams of zinc per day ? Also, with zinc it's important to increase the dose slowly or there might be some adverse effects, like hair loss.

Big, if true. Wouldn't one have trouble building up higher concentrations of zinc in the cells without ionophores though?

I think it may matter more if you are zinc deficient when you are infected.

But Zinc does not need to be in the cell to help. It will also increase ACE2 activity, which is more important they are finding. When the ACE2 is destroyed, there is a build up of ANGII, which seems to be causing a majority of the issues. They are in a trial giving ACE2 directly to patients.

I've looked at the findings from France (although I'm not a doctor, I can still look at the numbers and try to make sense of them). It does seem that people on ACE inhibitor blood pressure medication have worse outcomes than almost any other group. Which is relevant to me, since I've been taking lisinopril (an ACE inhibitor) for the past 5 years. The "official" medical recommendation is to continue taking it, but I'm pretty certain at this point that the official recommendations are more or less full of shit when it comes to C19. It's not their lungs that are on the line. If I get any symptoms, I'll stop taking it as a precaution, my blood pressure issues weren't that bad to begin with.

An ACE inhibitor means that you would have less ANGII which looks like it would be of benefit is what they are finding is true.

https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.04.07.20056788v...

ACE inhibitors lower ACE, not ACE2. They actually increase ACE2.

Thanks for this comment, this stuff is super confusing. The effect must have been dominated by age distribution then. A lot of the older folks take ACE inhibitors, so it could be that they fared worse just because they're older.

https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.04.07.20056788v... seems to support your assertion.

I was under the impression that meat eaters generally aren't deficient in Zinc. What do you think ?

I know a tin of oysters has over 250mg of zinc so there is that.

But yes, more zinc in meat for sure, and phytic acid will play a role reducing absorption, but deficiency could depend on genetics a lot as well.

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