Researchers Suggest Genetics Might Be Behind Patient Response to COVID-19

 

COVID-19, the disease caused by the novel coronavirus SARS-CoV-2, affects different people differently. As has been broadly noted, about 85% of cases are mild, while others can become fatally ill. Although the fatality rate is highest in the elderly and immunocompromised, it also can kill the relatively young and healthy, which is a somewhat unexpected aspect of the disease.

As the pandemic progresses, researchers are attacking the virus from every angle, and also learning more and more about how and why the virus affects who it does.

“We see huge differences in clinical outcomes and across countries,” said geneticist Andrea Ganna of the University of Helsinki’s Institute for Molecular Medicine Finland (FIMM).

For example, studies have found that risk factors include diabetes, hypertension, cardiovascular disease and lung disease. A study out of the University of Copenhagen, in Denmark, found that “diabetes was a comorbidity in 22% of 32 non-survivors in a study of 52 intensive care patients. In another study of 173 patients with severe disease, 16.2% had diabetes, and in further study of 140 hospitalized patients, 12% had diabetes.”

Diabetes was also a comorbidity in the previous SARS and MERS coronavirus infections, as well as in the severe influenza A H1N1 pandemic in 2009. The study indicated that hypertension was a comorbidity in COVID-19 in about 20% of cases, 16% of cardiovascular disease, and 6% for lung disease.

Diabetic patients, the study notes, “are at increased risk of infections including influenza and for related complications such as secondary bacterial pneumonia. Diabetes patients have impaired immune-response to infection both in relation to cytokine profile and to changes in immune-responses including T-cell and macrophage activation.” Many diabetics are obese, and obesity is also a risk factor for severe COVID-19.