Blood type does NOT affect risk of severe Covid, study concluded

Blood type does NOT affect risk of severe Covid, study concluded

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A person’s blood group does not affect the risk of developing severe Covid-19 or being hospitalized for the infection, a study concluded.

Previous studies have indicated that people with type A blood are at increased risk of contracting the coronavirus.

To determine whether this was true, American doctors reviewed the health records of more than 100,000 people who took the Covid-19 test in Utah, Idaho and Nevada between March and November 2020.

Cross-referencing their Covid status with the blood group revealed that there was no association between the two, disproving previous findings.

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People are more at risk of getting the coronavirus if they have type A blood, a study concluded. The laboratory-based analysis investigated previous reports that the blood group affects an individual's susceptibility to SARS-CoV-2 infection

People are more at risk of getting the coronavirus if they have type A blood, a study concluded. The laboratory-based analysis investigated previous reports that the blood group affects an individual’s susceptibility to SARS-CoV-2 infection

British people analysis by blood type

• The positive: 35%

• The negative: 13%

• A positive: 30%

• One negative: 8%

• B positive: 8%

• Negative B: 2%

• Positive AB: 2%

• Negative AB: 1%

Source: 900,000 blood donors in the NHS blood and transplant registry

The blood group is a characteristic determined by a person’s DNA and depends on the versions of the genes inherited from a person’s parents.

These genes determine the presence of antigens on the surface of red blood cells, the donut-shaped vessels that carry oxygen throughout the body in arteries and veins.

Antigens are protruding proteins and there are two versions, A and B, which are found on the surface of red blood cells, also known as erythrocytes.

Each person has A, B, A and B or none. These people will therefore have blood types A, B, AB and O, respectively, and this is known as the ABO blood group system.

Another antigen on cells, called Rhesus, is positive or negative and this determines whether a person is, for example, A positive or A negative.

Blood groups vary in their similarity depending on geography and ethnicity, but in the United Kingdom, the most common group is O positive, followed by A positive.

Previous studies have found that people with type A blood are at increased risk of contracting the virus.

The SARS-CoV-2 coronavirus has a greater affinity for other cells - such as those found in the respiratory tract - that express a specific type A molecule called antigen

The SARS-CoV-2 coronavirus has a greater affinity for other cells – such as those found in the respiratory tract – that express a specific type A molecule called antigen

The study concluded that convalescent plasma therapy does NOT reduce the risk of Covid-19

Injecting coronavirus patients with the blood of survivors does not increase their chances of improvement, concluded a large study.

Scientists conducting the REMAP-CAP study stopped enrolling infected patients in the ICU after discovering “without evidence” that convalescent plasma therapy increased survival rates.

Therapy was also abandoned by the world-leading RECOVERY study.

The former focuses on critically ill patients, while the latter involves hospitalized individuals, but not critical patients.

The findings from the study’s trials sound like the death sentence for the once promising treatment that was being praised by the NHS, NIH and academics.

One study suggested that type A people have more receptors to which the virus can bind, making them more susceptible.

But Dr. Jeffrey Anderson, of the Intermountain Medical Center Heart Institute in Salt Lake City, performed the most comprehensive and controlled analysis to date.

‘With contrasting reports from China, Europe, Boston, New York and elsewhere, we embarked on a large prospective case-control study that included more than 11,000 individuals who were recently infected with SARS-CoV-2, and we found no ABO associations with susceptibility or severity of the disease ”, write the study authors in their article, published today in the JAMA Network Open.

“Given the broad and prospective nature of our study and its strongly null results, we believe that important associations of SARS-CoV-2 and Covid-19 with ABO groups are unlikely,” they add.

The researchers are unable to explain why previous studies came to different conclusions, but cite several factors that may have led to previous results.

They say that pure chance, publication bias, genetic differences, geography and variants may have led to distorted data, indicating that some blood groups are at greater risk.

However, the study found that while the blood group does not, other factors do increase the risk of Covid-19.

These included being a man, being older and also non-white people.

“Among individuals with Covid-19, hospitalization was associated with male gender and age,” wrote the researchers. ‘ICU admission was also associated with male gender and age.’

The data also found that non-white people, including African Americans; American Indians or Alaskan Natives; Native Hawaiians or Pacific Islanders; Asians; and people who did not disclose their ethnicity are more likely to test positive.

However, there was no link between these people and the severity of the disease.

Previous evidence of how blood type affects Covid

On March 17, 2020, just when the virus was spreading in the UK and before the first blockade was introduced, MailOnline reported that Chinese researchers found that people with Type A blood are significantly more likely to get coronavirus than those with Type O.

The Wuhan study also found that people with Type A blood are more likely to die from COVID-19.

In the general population, Type O blood (34%) is more common than A (32%).

However, among COVID-19 patients, people with Type O accounted for only 25%, while Type A accounted for 41%.

People with Type O blood accounted for a quarter (25 percent) of deaths in the survey. Typically, Type O people make up 32 percent of people in Wuhan.

Researchers in China evaluated 2,173 people who were diagnosed with the coronavirus, including 206 people who died after contracting the virus, from three hospitals in Hubei.

Academics compared data from infected patients in Wuhan to 3,694 uninfected people in the same region.

Of the 206 patients who died in the study, 85 had type A blood, equivalent to 41 percent of all deaths.

In the healthy population of Wuhan, a city of 11 million, 34 percent of people are type A.

In the study cohort, 52 of the people who died were type O, representing a quarter of all deaths. Under normal conditions, only 32 percent of people are type O.

The numbers for all infections, not just deaths, are 26 percent and 38 percent for type O and type A, respectively.

In November 2020, MailOnline reported again in a similar study that found that people with type A blood are more at risk.

Researchers at the Institute for Clinical Evaluative Sciences in Toronto studied 225,556 people who had a blood test between 2007 and 2019 and a Covid swab in 2020.

The study found that people with type O blood are 12 percent less likely to get the coronavirus than other blood types.

He also revealed that those with a negative blood type (O-, A-, B- or AB-) are, on average, 21 percent less likely to catch the virus than people with a positive type.

Individuals with type O or negative blood are also 13 percent and 19 percent less likely to develop severe symptoms or die, respectively.

In the UK, about 15 percent of the population has a negative blood type and almost half (about 48 percent) are type O.

About one in eight people (13 percent) are O-, who are 26 percent less likely to become infected and 28 percent less likely to develop severe symptoms or die.

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