A new study claims that a person's blood group has no bearing on their risk of developing extreme COVID-19 or being hospitalized due to the infection.
A previous study says people with type A blood are more likely to contract the coronavirus.
To see if the claim was accurate, US doctors looked at the health records of over 100,000 people who took the Covid-19 test between March and November 2020 in Utah, Idaho, and Nevada.
When they compared their COVID-19 status to their blood group, they discovered there was no connection between the two, refuting previous findings.
How to Determine Blood Group?
A person's blood group is determined by their DNA and is based on the versions of genes they inherited from their parents.
Antigens on the surface of red blood cells, the donut-shaped vessels that carry oxygen throughout the body in arteries and veins, are regulated by these genes.
Antigens are protruding proteins present on the surface of red blood cells, also known as erythrocytes. There are two types of antigens: A and B.
Everyone has either A, B, A, and B, or none of the above. As a result, these individuals will have blood types A, B, AB, and O, which is known as the ABO blood group scheme.
A positive or negative antigen on the cells called Rhesus decides whether an individual is, for example, A positive or A negative.
The prevalence of blood groups varies by geography and ethnicity, but in the United Kingdom, O positive is the most common, followed by A positive.
Those With Type A Blood Type Have More Viral Receptors?
According to previous studies, people with type A blood have more receptors for the virus to bind to, making them more vulnerable.
Dr. Jeffrey Anderson of the Intermountain Medical Center Heart Institute in Salt Lake City, on the other hand, conducted the most thorough and regulated investigation yet.
'With conflicting reports from China, Europe, Boston, New York, and elsewhere, we conducted a massive, prospective case-control study with over 11,000 people who were newly infected with SARS-CoV-2, and we found no ABO associations with disease susceptibility or severity,' the study's authors write in their paper.
They published their study, titled "Association of Sociodemographic Factors and Blood Group Type With Risk of COVID-19 in a US Population," in JAMA Network Open.
'Given the large and prospective nature of our study and its strongly null results, we believe that important associations of SARS-CoV-2 and Covid-19 with ABO groups are unlikely,' they add.
Who are More Vulnerable Now?
The researchers are unable to understand why previous studies came to different conclusions, but they do point to a number of factors that could have contributed to the previous findings.
Pure chance, publishing bias, genetic variations, geography, and variants, they say, may have resulted in distorted data showing that certain blood groups are more vulnerable.
However, the study discovered that, while blood type has no bearing on the risk of Covid-19, other factors do.
Being a male, being older, and not being of white ethnicity were all factors.
'Among individuals with Covid-19, hospitalization was associated with male sex and age,' the researchers write. 'Admission to an ICU was also associated with male sex and age.'
Non-white people, such as African Americans, American Indians or Alaskan Natives, Native Hawaiians or Pacific Islanders, Asians, and those who did not reveal their ethnicity, were also more likely to test positive, according to the results.
However, there was no correlation between the seriousness of the disease and these individuals.
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