Adaptation of the hypothalamo-pituitary-thyroid and hypothalamo-pituitary-adrenal systems to a new infectious disease - COVID-19 in the development of COVID-19 pneumonia and/or cytokine storm

Abstract

The “new disease” COVID-19, which causes acute respiratory distress syndrome, by the time of writing this article had already affected 5 million 400 thousand people on Earth and claimed the lives of at least 400 thousand people in more than 200 countries. The disease can be either asymptomatic or occur with the development of severe viral pneumonia, complicated by acute respiratory syndrome and sepsis, myocarditis and renal failure. Although the likelihood of a more severe course is noted in individuals with diabetes, and these patients are mainly drawn to the attention of endocrinologists in the pandemic, the actual endocrine manifestations of COVID-19 are not yet considered in detail. There are few data on coronavirus damage to the pituitary, hypothalamus, thyroid gland and adrenal glands, their structural and functional disorders in case of COVID-19 infection, due to the lack of convincing results of preclinical and clinical studies. The literature review presented in this article does not claim to be a full-fledged systematic review, not only for the rea-son that to date, only 51 works have been found at the time of writing in the databases for the keywords «thyroid and COVID-19» and «adrenal and COVID-19», after excluding duplicates, but also because these messages themselves contain little information and are mainly based on analogies with previously existing viral infections and their role in the development of hypothalamus-pituitary axis pathology-adrenal glands and hypothalamus-pituitary-thyroid.