Metabolic Profiling at COVID-19 Onset Shows Disease Severity and Sex-Specific Dysregulation.

Background: metabolic changes through SARS-CoV-2 infection has been reported but not fully comprehended. This metabolic dysregulation affects multiple organs during COVID-19 and its early detection can be used as a prognosis marker of severity. Therefore, we aimed to characterize metabolic and cytokine profile at COVID-19 onset and its relationship with disease severity to identify metabolic profiles predicting disease progression. Material and Methods: we performed a retrospective cross-sectional study in 123 COVID-19 patients which were stratified as asymptomatic/mild, moderate and severe according to the highest COVID-19 severity status, and a group of healthy controls. We performed an untargeted plasma metabolic profiling (gas chromatography and capillary electrophoresis-mass spectrometry (GC and CE-MS)) and cytokine evaluation. Results: After data filtering and identification we observed 105 metabolites dysregulated (66 GC-MS and 40 CE-MS) which shown different expression patterns for each COVID-19 severity status. These metabolites belonged to different metabolic pathways including amino acid, energy, and nitrogen metabolism among others. Severity-specific metabolic dysregulation was observed, as an increased transformation of L-tryptophan into L-kynurenine. Thus, metabolic profiling at hospital admission differentiate between severe and moderate patients in the later phase of worse evolution. Several plasma pro-inflammatory biomarkers showed significant correlation with deregulated metabolites, specially with L-kynurenine and L-tryptophan. Finally, we describe a strong sex-related dysregulation of metabolites, cytokines and chemokines between severe and moderate patients. In conclusion, metabolic profiling of COVID-19 patients at disease onset is a powerful tool to unravel the SARS-CoV-2 molecular pathogenesis. Conclusions: This technique makes it possible to identify metabolic phenoconversion that predicts disease progression and explains the pronounced pathogenesis differences between sexes.

Who Got Infected with COVID-19? A Study of College Students in Wuhan (China).

College students represent a large group of people who frequently travel across regions, which increased their risk of infection and exacerbated the risk of COVID-19 spread throughout China. This study uses survey data from the end of April 2020 to analyze the status of COVID-19-infected cases, the group differences, and influencing factors in college students in Wuhan. The sample size was made up 4355 participants, including 70 COVID-19-infected students. We found that during the COVID-19 outbreak in early 2020, college students in Wuhan were primarily infected during off-campus events after winter break or infected in their hometowns after leaving Wuhan; the percentage of college students with severe cases was relatively low, and most had mild cases; however, a large proportion of asymptomatic cases may exist; there were significant group differences in gender, age and place of residence; and the risk of infection was closely related to the campus environment, in which the population density and number of faculty and students on campus had a significant impact. The results indicated that the infection of students did not occur at random, thus strengthening student health education and campus management can help curb the spread of COVID-19 among students.