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  • Advances in Respiratory Medicine is published by MDPI from Volume 90 Issue 4 (2022). Previous articles were published by another publisher in Open Access under a CC-BY (or CC-BY-NC-ND) licence, and they are hosted by MDPI on mdpi.com as a courtesy and upon agreement with Via Medica.
  • Review
  • Open Access

31 August 2020

Ageing, Sex, Obesity, Smoking and COVID-19—Truths, Myths and Speculations

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and
1
Department of Pathobiology of Respiratory Diseases, Medical University of Lodz, Lodz, Poland
2
Department of Pneumology and Allergy, Medical University of Lodz, Lodz, Poland
*
Author to whom correspondence should be addressed.

Abstract

In early December 2019, in the city of Wuhan in Hubei Province, China, the first infections by a novel coronavirus were reported. Since then, Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome Coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) has been spreading to other cities and countries becoming the global emerging epidemiological issue and quickly reaching the status of a pandemic. Multiple risk factors of disease severity and mortality have been identified so far. These include old age, male sex, smoking, and obesity. This concise narrative review highlights the important role of these factors in the pathobiology and clinical landscape of Coronavirus Disease 2019 (COVID-19). We especially focused on their significant role in disease severity and mortality. However, in spite of intensive research, most of the presented pieces of evidence are weak and need further verification.

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