Abstract:

In March of 2020, the World Health Organization declared the SARS-Cov2 2019 (COVID-19) outbreak a global pandemic after documenting community scale transmission in every region, including Latin America. The risk factors associated with severity of disease include older age, diabetes, hypertension, cardiovascular and lung diseases, and immune suppression. Additional evidence strongly suggests that obesity is also a risk factor for severe forms of COVID-19 disease, while other types of malnutrition increase the risk of hospitalization from influenza-like diseases, regardless of the causative agent of the illness (1). Although detailed data are not yet available on the impact of undernutrition in the evolution of COVID-19, given the known inflammatory response caused by this condition, it is reasonable to expect a suboptimal immune response and higher risk of severity, as found with obesity (2).

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COVID‐19, obesity and undernutrition: A major challenge for Latin American countries

Ada Cuevas

Simon Barquera

^{Center for Advanced Metabolic Medicine and Nutrition (CAMMYN), Santiago Chile,}

^{Centro de Investigación en Nutrición y Salud, Instituto Nacional de Salud Pública, Cuernavaca Morelos, México,}

Simon Barquera, Email: xm.psni@areuqrabs.

^{Corresponding author.}

^{Correspondence}
E‐mail: xm.psni@areuqrabs,

This article is being made freely available through PubMed Central as part of the COVID-19 public health emergency response. It can be used for unrestricted research re-use and analysis in any form or by any means with acknowledgement of the original source, for the duration of the public health emergency.

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