Covid-19 severe risk can now be predicted by the blood of a person. Blood type in the body can now predict how it may affect a person’s risk for COVID-19 and severe illness from the disease.
This has been revealed by a study in Denmark whose findings have been published in the journal Blood Advances.
The research was conducted in which the researchers compared more than 473,000 people in Denmark with COVID-19 to more than 2.2 million people in the general population.
The findings revealed that among COVID-19 patients, there was a lower percentage of people with blood type O and higher percentages of those with blood types A, B, and AB.
The study suggested that people with A, B, or AB blood may be more likely to be infected with COVID-19 than people with type O blood. Infection rates were similar among people with types A, B, and AB blood.
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The other study says 95 critically ill COVID-19 patients hospitalized in Canada and patients with type A or AB blood were more likely to require mechanical ventilation, and they had greater rates of lung injury from COVID-19. More patients with A and AB blood required dialysis for Kidney failure, the study added.
According to the researchers, the results suggest that COVID-19 patients with A and AB blood types may have an increased risk of organ dysfunction or failure than those with type O or B blood.
They also found that while people with blood types A and AB did not have longer overall hospital stays than those with types O or B, on the average, they were in intensive care longer, which can indicate more severe COVID-19.
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Dr. Mypinder Sekhon, a clinical instructor in the Division of Critical Care Medicine at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, Canada said, “The unique part of our study is our specialization in the severity effect of blood group on COVID-19. We observed this lung and kidney damage, and in future studies; we’ll want to tease out the effect of blood type and COVID-19 on other vital organs.”
“Of particular importance as we still traverse the pandemic, we now have a good range of survivors who are exiting the acute a part of COVID-19, but we’d like to explore mechanisms by which to risk stratify those with longer-term effects,” he added.