Do People with Certain Blood Types Have Worse Covid-19 Symptoms?

some speculation has been brewing about the connection between blood type and coven 19 symptom severity in fact tiffany a writer here at healthcare triage decided to pull the research because a doctor told her grandma that certain blood types may be less likely to experience severe symptoms if infected was that doctor right that's the topic of this week's healthcare triage [Music] so what does your blood type have to do with the new coronavirus well anagens are a protein on red blood cells that are a critical component of the immune response they also determine which blood type you are we know that a person's blood group can affect their susceptibility to certain infections and we have some evidence that this is true for sars the coronavirus we saw back in 2003 so it makes sense that researchers wanted to investigate the question for the current coronavirus as with many of our questions at this point in the pandemic it's too early to know many things for sure but we rounded up a handful of papers to find the best answer we could with the currently available evidence we'll start with a couple pre-print papers remember that pre-prints have yet to be peer-reviewed or published something good to keep in mind as you consider the data the first examine the distribution of blood types in over 2 100 patients diagnosed with covet 19 and compared them to a group of non-infected controls blood type aid distribution was higher among infected versus non-infected people while blood type o was lower and the same was true when blood type distribution was examined among those who would succumb to the disease the second examining over 1500 coven 19 patients reported the same blood type distributions but also reported that only rh positive individuals were significantly affected it's worth noting that rh negative blood types are rare so this could skew the data they also examined clinical outcomes and reported no strong connection between blood type and intubation or death and now moving on to published studies we see a somewhat similar story one published in april examined just 186 individuals with confirmed coven 19 infections and found that type a blood groups were much more prevalent and type o much less prevalent among covet patients when compared to healthy controls with no significant effects on clinical outcomes another recent publication examining 187 coveted patients similarly found a higher proportion of type a and lower proportion of type o when compared to healthy controls unlike the previous study however they do report some associations with clinical outcomes over 85 percent of patients with type a reported fever 76 of patients with type b 54 with type o and 57 with type a b cough was also highest among those with type a at just over 71 percent though this was also true for type a b types b and o reported coughing at around 57 and 43 respectively both type a and type o were more likely to present with fatigue and type a b was most likely to experience difficulty breathing in complete contrast a third study conducted at the massachusetts general hospital found that blood types b and a b not type a were associated with higher odds of testing positive though like the previous studies they also reported that type o was associated with lower risk in terms of clinical outcomes they found no association between blood type and risk of intubation or death and last but not least a recently published genome-wide association study found gene variants in two locations on the human genome associated with covin-19 disease severity with one of those areas also containing genes responsible for determining blood type blood group analysis confirmed the majority of other reports among patients with coven 19 and varying degrees of respiratory failure the proportion of type a was higher and proportion of typo lower when compared to controls so what does all this mean although it's hard to say at this point the majority of the data seem to suggest that blood type could be related to susceptibility but is less likely to predict symptom severity but the results are mixed and somewhat contradictory which is not unexpected early on in a scientific question remember that some of these papers are preprints all come from different researchers and places so there's probably some variation in methods and demographics to consider and many have not controlled for critical factors in the rush to provide needed data for example the genome-wide association study did not adjust for contributing cardiovascular and metabolic factors and there are other considerations like the 34 recognized human blood group systems with difference in antigen expression between them suggesting that examination of blood type subgroups may be important to the story at this point this is interesting information but likely shouldn't change the way you conduct yourself if you have one blood type versus another type a shouldn't panic and type o should still practice social distancing hey do you enjoy this episode you might enjoy this other episode we did recently it's an update on masks we'd also appreciate it if you like the video and subscribe down below we'd also love you to consider going on to patreon.com healthcare triage where you can help support the show keep it going even a pandemic we'd like to especially thank our research associates james glasgow joe sevitz josh kister and michael chin and of course our surgeon admiral sam

Channel: Healthcare Triage

Views: 2,737,202

Keywords: health, healthcare, health care, health insurance, health policy, Aaron Carroll

Id: dcVl-FIu5AI

Length: 5min 18sec (318 seconds)

Published: Wed Aug 26 2020