In two new studies, researchers found new evidence that blood type may affect a person’s risk for COVID-19 and severe illness from the disease.
The research was conducted by a team at the University of British Columbia.
In one study, the team compared more than 473,000 people in Denmark with COVID-19 to more than 2.2 million people in the general population.
Among the COVID-19 patients, they found there was a lower percentage of people with blood type O and higher percentages of those with types A, B, and AB.
The findings suggest 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.
In the second study, researchers tested 95 critically ill COVID-19 patients hospitalized in Canada.
They found patients with type A or AB blood were more likely to require mechanical ventilation, suggesting that they had greater rates of lung injury from COVID-19.
More patients with type A and AB blood required dialysis for kidney failure.
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, according to the researchers.
The researchers also found that while people with blood types A and AB didn’t have longer overall hospital stays than those with types O or B, on average, they were in intensive care longer, which may indicate more severe COVID-19.
The team says their studies focus on the severity effect of blood type on COVID-19.
They observed this lung and kidney damage, and in future studies, they will want to tease out the effect of blood group and COVID-19 on other vital organs.
One author of the studies is Dr. Mypinder Sekhon.
The study findings are published in the journal Blood Advances.
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