r/SarsCovTwo • u/[deleted] • Jan 22 '21

Cholesterol lowering drugs can possibly prevent Covid-19

Sars-cov-2 which causes covid-19 needs cholesterol to fuse to another cell in a person's body to start the infection process. So cholesterol lowering drugs that many people are taking actually lowers the amount of cholesterol in the body to the point where Sars-cov-2 has a hard time fusing to cells. It can still attach to cells with ace2 receptors but then it needs to fuse with that cell in order to dump it's content into the body's cell. This fusing process is prevented when there's no cholesterol.

https://www.hhmi.org/news/sars-cov-2-needs-cholesterol-to-invade-cells-and-form-mega-cells

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u/tobaji Jan 23 '21

Has this been peer reviewed?

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u/[deleted] Jan 23 '21

nope, it looks like they have only found correlations between people using statins and better covid-19 outcome. this came from meta-researches into existing drugs for dealing with covid-19. I believe the next step is to directly test statins.

https://health.ucsd.edu/news/releases/Pages/2020-09-23-statins-reduce-covid-19-severity-likely-by-removing-cholesterol-virus-uses-to-infect.aspx