New Research, Risk of Severe Covid-19 Can be Known from Protein and Blood Type

By: Alish Palmos, Christopher Hübel and Vincent Millischer

VARIOUS factors play a role in a complex disease like Covid-19, and knowing what those factors are is important for predicting how people will be affected.

Early in the pandemic, old age, being overweight, or smoking has been shown to increase your risk of developing severe COVID-19. This information helps the community to prioritize giving vaccines to the elderly.

But there are other biological factors that play a role in Covid-19 that are less highlighted. This relates to, for example, the thousands of proteins with different functions circulating in your blood. Some play a role in the body’s defense against viruses, others transport molecules throughout the body or act as messengers to distribute information.

Through this function, proteins can influence the development and severity of Covid and most importantly, we don’t all have the same amount of them inside of us.

Also read: Reasons Blood Type A Is More Likely To Be Infected With Covid-19

This is why people develop different forms of Covid-19 symptoms: some have a runny nose or fever, while others have to go to the hospital. Some unlucky people may require intensive care, and in the most severe cases, some may die.

Because the amount of protein in the human body is so large, it is difficult to pinpoint the exact proteins and biological systems that affect them. However, this is what our team wants to do.

We explored more than 3,000 blood proteins using a technique called Mendelian randomisation.

This is where, instead of directly measuring something you think has an effect on a disease (in this case, a blood protein) and then seeing if its levels correlate with the severity of the disease, you’re looking at the variation in the genes that affect it, and how it affects how it does this. affect the diagnosis.

This is because if you look at blood protein levels directly, you can’t be sure that other outside factors like lifestyle choices, or even having Covid-19 have no effect when you measure them. Genes, on the other hand, do not change over the course of a person’s life.

Also read: Getting to know Golden Blood, the World’s Rare Blood Type

Therefore, they allow you to identify people with high and low levels of the substance you want to check, thus making for a more robust result of how something like a blood protein affects a disease like Covid-19.

First, we had to identify which genes were associated with the different blood proteins. We did this by looking at the results of genome association studies.

This is a large part of research that looks at genetic and biological differences in many people, to track the relationship between genetic variants and certain characteristics. Large-scale genome results can also track the association between genes and the risk of severe COVID-19 as well.

We analyzed this data by identifying several proteins that could potentially increase or decrease the risk of severe COVID-19. For example, we found that increased levels of a protein called FAAH2 can increase a person’s risk of requiring hospitalization for Covid.

FAAH2 causes cells to absorb and inactivate substances called endocannabinoids. It has anti-inflammatory effects, and research has even suggested it could be used as a treatment for Covid-19.

Also read: Is it true that blood type is related to the risk of being infected with Covid-19?

This would explain why having more of this protein could potentially reduce the body’s ability to control the inflammation caused by Covid-19.

Another influential protein is enzim ABO. This determines blood type you and is a hot topic in Covid-19 research. Our study shows that having higher levels of the ABO enzyme appears to increase the risk of being hospitalized for Covid and subsequently requiring intensive care.

Previous small studies have shown that blood type A is more common in those with severe COVID-19. Our findings strengthen the case that ABO enzymes and blood type influence the severity of Covid.

Covid-19 can also cause disease of the blood vessels, especially if it is severe. But we found that a protein that attracts white blood cells to the walls of blood vessels appears to protect against severe COVID-19.

Attracting more white blood cells like this has long been known to boost immune responses in blood vessel walls, and in Covid-19 in particular it appears to help fight infection.

Identifying these risk factors could help scientists develop new treatments, as these proteins can be addressed by new (or existing) drugs that have been reused.

It also allowed us to compile a list of proteins that other researchers could prioritize, so that in the future we can better understand what the biological risk factors for Covid-19 are.

Alish Palmos
Postdoctoral Research Associate, King’s College London

Christopher Hübel
Research Associate in Medicine, Psychology and Behavioural Genetics, King’s College London

Vincent Millischer
Resident in Psychiatry, Medical University of Vienna

This article was published on Kompas.com thanks to the collaboration with The Conversation Indonesia. The above article is taken from the original article entitled “New research: risk of severe COVID-19 can be determined from protein and blood type“. The contents are beyond the responsibility of Kompas.com.

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