Interesting article on TNF blockers i found and my experience with Covid-19
First and foremost, please don't take this the wrong way. I have zero proof that this is true, but we might find it to be therapy possibly in the future. With the discovery of Plaquenil as a possible anti-viral drug to combat this, i found this very interesting.
With that being said, my story is basically that I truly feel that my wife is currently infected with Covid 19. We live in rural america, we are fairly isolated as far as where we live. About 2 weeks ago we traveled to Las Vegas for a weekend trip. We found out after arriving in Las Vegas that there was one positive case in the city. Now there is an explosion of cases there as they are being tested, one being close to me in my state with travel also related to Las Vegas. We brought hand sanitizer and wipes and washed our hands constantly and avoided going out during peak times while still trying to enjoy ourselves. The evening we got back, my wife started feeling sick. 2 days later we took her to the doctor with flu-like symptoms. She was tested for Flu and strep and tested negative. 2 days later her syptoms got significantly worse. I work in healthcare and i work directly with our administration. I stayed in contact with our administration about our issue. My wife was very sick, i seemed to be unscathed. Our administration called our state health department to try to get her tested. Our state health department didn't call back. I don't know if its the same everywhere, but as of last weekend, nobody could get tested, even if they met all criteria, without our health departments approval. Today marks the 11th day and she is just now starting to have an ease of symptoms. I've never seen my wife so sick in my life. I am so relieved she is getting better, but this brings me to my question...
Why am i, an immuno-suppressed person seemingly unaffected, while my wife who is relatively young, has zero health issues, eats extremely healthy and is ideal body weight and shape, extremely affected by this.
A lot of us here take DMARDS, specifically TNF-blockers (Humira, Cimzia, etc). I've been researching like mad trying to figure this out, then i thought about my drug for RA. I've ran across numerous studies that speak directly of TNF and Coronaviruses. From what i can surmise from deciphering these studies is that Coronaviruses attach to the ACE2 receptor, then use TNF to facilitate infection. So is it possible, that since i take TNF blockers, that if the infection utilizes TNF and it is being blocked, does that offer resistance to the infection. SARS is a similar virus, in the coronavirus family, and it specifically mentions using Anti-TNF as a treatment. Please see this article, specifically Table 8.
Posted Mar 19, 2020, 4:33 PM UTC
Just to add to this, Hydroxychloroquine which was just approved by the president as a possible treatment, and several others have talked about the past few days, also works by reducing the presence of TNF.