Significant sex differences in Covid-19 immune response

Most of "feeling sick" isn't the actual bacteria/virus causing problems, it's your immune system doing things like raising your internal temperature to fight off the virus or generating boatloads of phlegm to do whatever that does.

A fever is the result of an immune response.

Thanks for the link! Paper seems to go out of its way to indicate that it is just lower in urine, not absent.

Is this a joke? Just wanted to check because my own shocking results show that we're urinating all over ourselves and without doubt many droplets reach those on neighboring urinals. I bought a nice pair of wool designer shorts by D.gnak $250 and for whatever reason they have the incredible property of causing water to bead up in a way I've never seen before. While wearing them one day, I went to wash my hands and realized I was covered in 20-30 beads of liquid. Yes after using the urinal. I was horrified, soaped up a paper towel and cleaned it. I thought it was a one off event but soon realized it is IMPOSSIBLE no matter how carefully, softly, and at what angle one fires at the urinal to actually get less than 20 beads of pee on oneself. I tried for months, shocked every time. With any other type of clothing the beads don't form but the same liquid is instead instantly absorbed into the fibers.

I'm not accusing us of literally stepping into the urinal. I thought the data was fairly clear that men are worse at washing their hands than women are. And it seems a safe claim that splash back from the urinal is not zero.

That said, I'm calling this my pet idea, in large because I think it is a silly one. Do I think it is in the realm of plausible? I mean, yeah. But I don't think it has stepped into the realm of likely.

And that could maybe contribute to something. There were other studies, though, which didn't take BMI into account at all, even though high BMI is a known risk factor, and generally more men are obese than women.

Those kinds of effects would presumably count as "gender-specific differences". Previous investigations never really took body mass into account at all, which was...bad.

Not to mention scratching their groins. Some kind of immune response is involved in that, I'm sure. No need for the free clinic to get it cured when you're paid as much as an MLB player.

That's probably tobacco, or at least was stereotyped as such historically.

You might expect some difference, but I think people who take steroids for recreational or cosmetic purposes or to cheat at sports are a bit different; base jumpers would generally know and accept that base jumping is dangerous, but do it because they enjoy it, whereas steroid abusers are often self-deluding; they don't acknowledge that it's dangerous at all.

A real, robust knowledge of the relative danger of steroids is tough to develop.

Because you can’t plausibly do a long-term blinded trial where you take a healthy population and dope them up. The in vitro data is enough to make any institutional review board blanch.

So you have to rely on self-reported usage. Which is incredibly unreliable, and full of confounds. (My bias, my fairly well-informed bias, is that nobody is just doing steroids. There is always another drug or high-risk activity.)

So yeah. Steroids are dangerous. Do we know exactly how bad, especially in comparison to other drugs of abuse? Not as far as I can tell. But bad enough that you should absolutely be wary of steroids. (Also there’s gradations of dangerous. You stay away from trenbolone.)

If I based my risk of death on people I personally knew, I'd believe that I was immune to dying from, say, being hit by a car, and would almost certainly die of either heart disease or suicide. That's a ridiculous way to do things.

I don't know that many people in the steroid-abusing demographics (it was less of a thing in my age demographic than it is with the youth of today), but I am aware that it's dangerous.

Dangerous isn't always fatal: https://www.drugabuse.gov/publications/drugfacts/anabolic-st...

I would look at the many early deaths of professional wrestlers as a good example of deaths due to steroid usage.

Steroid use is linked among other things with embolism, stroke, heart attack and sudden death.

I don’t really know the etymology. I have just always seen steroids called “gear”, and then figured “on the bike” derived from that.

But also how dare you suggest that the highest levels of competitive sport, where the margin of victory is razor-slim, and you only have a few years of peak performance, are infested with drugs? How crass. How immoral. I miss the simpler days of my youth, when Hulk Hogan told us we just had to take our vitamins.

Perhaps because steroids for muscle growth are meant to be "cycled" (i.e. used in a cycle of A, then switch to B, then C, etc.)

it's not because of the Tour de France type of "cycling", but rather because of this:

"Steroids are often used in patterns called "cycling." This involves taking multiple doses of steroids over a specific period of time, stopping for a period, and starting again."

https://www.drugabuse.gov/publications/research-reports/ster...