Abstract
In December 2019, a novel coronavirus known as SARS-CoV-2 was first detected in Wuhan, China, causing outbreaks of the coronavirus disease COVID-19 that has now spread globally. For this reason, The World Health Organization (WHO) declared COVID-19 a public health emergency in March 2020. People living with pre-existing conditions such as obesity, cardiovascular diseases, type 2 diabetes (T2D), and chronic kidney and lung diseases, are prone to develop severe forms of disease with fatal outcomes. Metabolic diseases such as obesity and T2D alter the balance of innate and adaptive responses. Both diseases share common features characterized by augmented adiposity associated with a chronic systemic low-grade inflammation, senescence, immunoglobulin glycation, and abnormalities in the number and function of adaptive immune cells. In obese and T2D patients infected by SARS-CoV-2, where immune cells are already hampered, this response appears to be stronger. In this review, we describe the abnormalities of the immune system, and summarize clinical findings of COVID-19 patients with pre-existing conditions such as obesity and T2D as this group is at greater risk of suffering severe and fatal clinical outcomes.
Highlights
Outbreak of the Coronavirus disease in 2019 (COVID-19) has spread rapidly across the world evidencing the weakness of the public health system worldwide [1,2]
We describe the abnormalities of the immune system, and summarize clinical findings of COVID-19 patients of the pre-existing condition immune system such as obesity and type 2 diabetes (T2D)
Great concern has been shown as a result of these observations, being necessary to carry out more studies to know if this phenomenon reflects an altered immunomodulation in patients with COVID-19, mainly in those groups with a higher risk of fatal outcome
Summary
Outbreak of the Coronavirus disease in 2019 (COVID-19) has spread rapidly across the world evidencing the weakness of the public health system worldwide [1,2]. Obesity affects more than 650 million people and 463 million has T2D worldwide [10,11] Both diseases share a common feature, augmented adiposity associated with a chronic systemic low-grade inflammation which induce dysregulation of the immune system and increasing susceptibility to develop infections [8,12,13,14,15,16]. We describe the abnormalities of the immune system, and summarize clinical findings of COVID-19 patients of the pre-existing condition immune system such as obesity and T2D It focuses on the inflammatory state, lymphocytic profile, and predictors of COVID-19 severity, describing the main differences in terms of immune response to SARS-CoV-2 infection when compared to infected healthy individuals
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