Doctors in France think that smoking can be good and bad for people who are at risk of getting the new coronavirus infection.

Smoking is a risk factor for COVID-19 patients, but a particular substance in cigarettes, nicotine, could prevent infection in some people or improve the prognosis for COVID-19.

French doctors will use patches in a clinical study to see if nicotine could prevent coronavirus infections and help existing patients.

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Smoking is terrible for you, as any doctor on the planet will tell you. Smoking is a risk factor for various medical conditions and can worsen the outcome for COVID-19 patients. Smoking regular cigarettes is bad for patients who get the new coronavirus, as is smoking marijuana. That's because the lungs are where the main battle between the virus and the immune system takes place. Complications of COVID-19 include difficulty breathing and some people end up needing oxygen therapy and ventilators. But it turns out that smoking can have a beneficial side effect: It could actually help completely prevent a new coronavirus infection. That doesn't mean you should quit smoking, but a substance in cigarettes could prevent some people from getting the new disease, and French doctors now want to test nicotine patches against COVID-19.

Smoking does not guarantee that you will not get a COVID-19 infection, and smoking can worsen your COVID-19 infection. But French doctors observed that fewer COVID-19 patients were smokers than they expected, The Guardian reports. A team at the Pitié-Salpêtrière hospital in Paris wrote a study on the subject, proposing a nicotine patch trial that could provide additional answers.

"Our cross-sectional study strongly suggests that those who smoke every day are much less likely to develop severe or symptomatic infection with Sars-CoV-2 compared to the general population," says the Pitié-Salpêtrière study. "The effect is significant. Divide the risk by five for outpatients and by four for those admitted to the hospital. We rarely see this in medicine. "

Doctors observed 480 patients who tested positive, 350 of whom were hospitalized. Of those admitted, 4.4% were regular smokers, while 5.3% of those who were released had smoked. The average age of the former was 65 years, while those with less severe symptoms had an average age of 44 years. These figures are not in line with the statistics of the general population in France. According to the local authority of Santé Publique France, around 40% of those between 44 and 53 years of age smoke and between 8.8% and 11.3% of those between 65 and 75 years of age are smokers.

The study appears to confirm the findings of similar research from China. A study published in the New England Journal of Medicine in late March said that only 12.6% of 1,000 patients were smokers, a figure that was significantly less than expected. About 28% of people in China are smokers.

French neurobiologist Jean-Pierre Changeux reviewed the French study and suggested that nicotine may be responsible for preventing the new coronavirus from reaching certain cells in the body. As a result, the spread of the virus could stop. Nicotine may also reduce the immune reaction in severe cases of COVID-19. Frontline healthcare workers, COVID-19 patients, and ICU patients will receive nicotine patches as part of a clinical trial that will attempt to verify these findings.

As with other COVID-19 studies, more research is required. And as with other studies detailing possible treatments for coronavirus, you shouldn't take matters into your own hands. Don't start smoking or using the nicotine patch just because one theory says the substance can prevent further coronavirus infections or improve the prognosis for COVID-19.

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