Let's Research Together: How Many Cases of Strongyloides Infection Due to Steroids Can We Find?

This Substack is called “Do Your Own Research.” It would not live up to its name if we didn’t do some research together, now would it?

As I’m researching around the Strongyloides Hyperinfection Syndrome incidence resulting from the administration of corticosteroids, I start digging in the literature. I can find only three cases, only one of which was lethal. I also found another six cases of strongyloidiasis linked to COVID-19 treatment with corticosteroids for a total of nine cases:

(click to enlarge)

Six of the cases are listed in Pereira et al., which also gives us a nice infographic:

Now, as far as I know, this is the largest list of cases anyone has pulled together.

You can see all nine cases (so far) in a Google Spreadsheet here.

It would be amazing if you can help me identify more cases of strongyloidiasis linked to COVID-19 treatment with corticosteroids so we can get a sense of how common it is, what doses trigger it, how soon after infection it occurs, what sex it affects the most (males, but still).

All this will help evaluate the hypothesis that ivermectin studies for COVID-19 are confounded by strongyloides hyperinfections.

Feel free to leave a comment with as many of the following as you can:

• Name of first author on case report

• Sex of patient

• Age of patient

• Strongyloidiasis positive on day

• Hyperinfection / Dissemination

• Death?

• Corticosteroid administered

• Corticosteroid dose

• Patient origin country

• Patient treated in country

• Link to paper

Let’s see if we can make some real progress on this by doing our own research!