People With O Blood Type May Have Low COVID-19 Risk & Severity: Studies

Bhubaneswar: Two studies have pointed out that people with blood type O may be less vulnerable to COVID-19 and have lower chances of suffering severe complications, CNN reported.

However, more research is needed, it added.

The findings were published in the journal Blood Advances on Wednesday. The studies mention that people with blood type O are less prone to COVID-19 infection.

“It is very important to consider the proper control group because blood type prevalence may vary considerably in different ethnic groups and different countries,” study author Torben Barington from the University of Southern Denmark was quoted as saying by IANS.

In the study, researchers compared data from a group of 2.2 million people from the Danish general population to nearly 473,000 individuals in the Danish health registry tested for COVID-19.

According to the results, COVID-19 infection is more likely to occur in people with blood types ‘A’, ‘B’, or ‘AB’, in comparison to those with blood type ‘O’. The researchers also found that blood groups ‘A’ and ‘AB’ faced an increased risk of disease severity from the infection.

There was no significant difference in the rate of infection between ‘A’, ‘B’, and ‘AB’ types.

Barrington added, “We have the advantage of a strong control group – Denmark is a small, ethnically homogenous country with a public health system and a central registry for lab data – so our control is population-based, giving our findings a strong foundation.”

According to CNN, the other study by researchers in Canada found that among 95 patients critically ill with COVID-19, a higher proportion with blood type A or AB — 84% — required mechanical ventilation compared with patients with blood group O or B, which was 61%.

It also found that a high number of patients with ‘A’ and ‘AB’ type required dialysis for kidney failure.

“As a clinician … it is at the back of my mind when I look at patients and stratify them. But in terms of a definitive marker we need repeated findings across many jurisdictions that show the same thing,” Dr Mypinder Sekhon, an intensive care physician at Vancouver General Hospital and an author of the Canadian study, told CNN.

These new findings add to the evidence found in an earlier study published in the journal Clinical Infectious Diseases. This study had found people with blood type ‘O’ had a reduced probability of getting COVID-19 infection, than people with blood type ‘A’.