Will nicotine be a light in the end of Coronavirus tunnel?

   

Does nicotine save users from contracting the coronavirus / COVID-19, or downsize its impact once it’s in the body? These are massive —and highly controversial questions. we would get solid answers shortly.

   A clinical trial is an attempt to begin in France, providing nicotine patches to COVID-19 patients and measuring the results. The trial has intended by the celebrated Pasteur Institute neurobiologist Jean-Pierre Changeux, an expert on the cholinergic system (which includes the nicotinic receptors).

   Most COVID-19 patient data has measured the number of infected smokers, but has not identified smokeless tobacco or e-cigarette users, it’s possible that some  component in tobacco is exerting a protective effect. But the interaction between nicotine and receptors used for access to the organs by the coronavirus is the only the hypothesis that has so far been assumed by researchers, and it seems the most probable.


 Researchers have speculated about the potential protective effects of nicotine since the earliest coronavirus data from China showed that smokers were infected at significantly lower rates than the general public.

  

 We observed in a March 12 story that five studies from China showed that just 3.9-14.5 percent of diagnosed COVID-19 patients were noted as smokers, while the smoking the rate for Chinese men is about 50 percent. That gulf has been seen again and again as data came in from other cohorts.

On January, beginning of this year I had a suspicion about the protective effect of nicotine on the coronavirus. pic.twitter.com/xuctFYd31k

— Eliana Golberstein Rubashkyn(@ElianaGolber) April 23, 2020

   In late January'2020, New Zealand pharmaceutical researcher and harm Eliana Golberstein Rubashkyn posed a possible mechanism by which nicotine could prevent the coronavirus from adhering to the receptors in the body’s cells that are its prime entry point. She posted her suggestion on Twitter.
In late March, cardiologist and e-cigarette researcher Konstantinos Farsalinos published a preliminary study that mentioned the low number of smokers in published data and proposed a similar explanation. Nicotine might block the coronavirus from finding its target cells, Farsalinos said.

  Since then, information from other countries—like the United States and France—have shown similar low rates of infection among smokers, and Farsalinos has updated his study with the new information. His hypothesis has evolved to also suggest that nicotine might modulate the “hyperinflammatory” reaction of the immune system (the so-called cytokine storm) that has been noted in some of the worst COVID-19 cases. If that’s right, nicotine may help prevent infection, and also reduce the damage caused in already infected patients.

 Farsalinos calls for clinical trials with nicotine replacement therapies to test his concept. The final journal publication of his research paper—co-written with his University of West Attica (Greece) colleague Prof. Anastasia Barbouni and New York University Prof. Raymond Niaura—is due soon.

Plausible hypotheses that nicotine is protective against more severe COVID-19 symptoms are emerging. They are consistent with case data showing smokers are strikingly underrepresented in hospitalisations. It is too soon to accept such theories, but they can’t be ignored either. https://t.co/3ZaO4s8Jbq

— Clive Bates (@Clive_Bates) April 22, 2020

   On the other hand, Dr. Changeux and his French colleagues may have beaten the Farsalinos team to the punch—at least for purposes of fame and glory. Their paper, which wasn’t published in preliminary form until nearly a month after Farsalinos’ early version appeared, follows almost exactly the same methodology (applied to a group of French patients) and has essentially the same conclusions as to the Farsalinos paper. Yet they don’t cite Farsalinos’ work.
 
  Controversies in science are historic. But it would be a shame if Dr. Farsalinos, who has devoted so much of his life to research on nicotine and vaping, doesn’t get part of the public acclaim if nicotine indeed prevents deaths from COVID-19.

  No matter who gets credit for the discovery may have to move mountains to convert the knowledge into rapid action. Tobacco control and public health interests will be chained against any conclusion that nicotine could be beneficial to society as a whole. Anyone advising preventive use of nicotine products—even those proven to be non-addictive, like patches—will be skewered and roasted alive by the industry that has spent the previous 30 years turning the public thinking of nicotine into something similar a glittering annoyance.