Huge Study Finds Blood Proteins That Could Increase Risk of Severe COVID

Knowing what factors play a role in complex diseases is important for predicting how different people will be affected.

Being older, overweight, or smoking was identified as increasing your risk of developing severe COVID. The elderly were prioritized in the vaccine roll out.

There are other biological factors that are not well understood. Take a look at the thousands of different types of proteins in your blood.

Some play a role in the body's defense against viruses, others transport molecules around the body, or act as messengers to distribute information.

These functions can impact the development and severity of COVID, and we don't all have the same amount of them inside us.

Some people get a cold, while others need to go to the hospital. In the worst cases, some may die, and an unlucky few may need intensive care.

It is difficult to identify the exact biological systems that cause different outcomes because of the large number of proteins in the human body. This is what our team wanted to do.

We used a technique called Mendelian randomization to explore more than 3000 blood proteins.

This is where, instead of directly measuring something that you think has an effect on a disease, and then seeing if levels of it correlate with disease severity, you look at variation in the genes that influence that substance's levels, and examine.

If you look at blood levels directly, you can't be sure that other factors, like lifestyle choices, aren't affecting them at the time.

Genes don't change during someone's lifetime. They allow you to more reliably identify people with high and low levels of substances you are interested in, and so make more robust estimates of how something like a bloodprotein affects a disease.

We had to identify which genes were associated with which blood proteins. We looked at the results of association studies.

These are large pieces of research that look at genetic and biological differences in many people to see if there are any correlations between them. Large-scale genome-wide results have been able to trace links between genes.

We identified several genes that could increase or decrease the risk of severe COVID.

Increased levels of aprotein called FAAH2 may increase the risk of someone needing hospital treatment for COVID. endocannabinoids are substances that cells absorb and inactivate.

Studies suggest they could be used as treatments for COVID. This would explain why having more proteins that remove them is problematic, because it could make it harder to control inflammation caused by COVID.

The ABO enzyme was identified as one of the influential genes. This is a hot topic in COVID research. Our study shows that having higher levels of the ABO enzyme increases the risk of being hospitalized with COVID and needing intensive care.

Blood group A is more common in people with severe COVID. The case that the ABO and blood type influence severity is strengthened by our findings.

It can cause disease in the blood vessels. We found that white blood cells that are attracted to the wall of blood vessels appear to be protected.

It has been shown that attracting more white blood cells can improve the immune response in blood vessel walls, and it seems to help fight off infections.

Scientists may be able to develop new treatments if they know the risk factors.

In the future, we can understand more about what the biological risk factors for COVID are, because it has allowed us to draw up a list of proteins that can be prioritized by other researchers.

Alish Palmos, Christopher Hübel, andVincent Millischer are residents in Psychiatry at King's College London.

This article is free to use under a Creative Commons license. The original article is worth a read.