In two recent studies, researchers confirmed that blood type may affect a person’s risk for COVID-19 and severe illness from the disease.
The findings are published in the journal Blood Advances. One author is Dr. Mypinder Sekhon.
In one study at the University of British Columbia, researchers 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.
In another 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 team 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 researchers say that 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.
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