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FRIDAY, June 26, 2020 (HealthDay News) — Patients with COVID-19 and severe disease have associations at locus 3p21.31 and 9q34.2, which are significant at the genomewide level, according to a study published online June 17 in the New England Journal of Medicine<\/i>.<\/p>\n
David Ellinghaus, Ph.D., from Christian-Albrechts University in Kiel, Germany, and colleagues conducted a genomewide association study involving 1,980 patients with COVID-19 and severe disease at seven hospitals in the Italian and Spanish epicenters of the severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 pandemic to identify potential genetic factors involved in COVID-19 development. The final analysis included data from 835 patients and 1,255 control participants from Italy and 775 patients and 950 control participants from Spain. A total of 8,582,968 single-nucleotide polymorphisms were analyzed.<\/p>\n
The researchers detected cross-replicating associations with rs11385942 at locus 3p21.31 and with rs657152 at locus 9q34.2; in meta-analysis of the two case-control panels, these were significant at the genomewide level (odds ratios, 1.77 and 1.32, respectively). The association signal at locus 3p21.31 spanned SLC6A20<\/i>, LZTFL1<\/i>, CCR9<\/i>, FYCO1<\/i>, CXCR6<\/i>, and XCR1<\/i>. The association signal at 9q34.2 coincided with the locus of the ABO<\/i> blood groups; in this cohort, the risk was higher in blood group A versus other blood groups (odds ratio, 1.45), while a protective effect was seen in blood group O (odds ratio, 0.65).<\/p>\n
“Further exploration of current findings, both as to their usefulness in clinical risk profiling of patients with COVID-19 and toward a mechanistic understanding of the underlying pathophysiology, is warranted,” the authors write.<\/p>\n