Your blood type may predict your risk for severe COVID-19

(HealthDay)—There’s more evidence that blood type may affect a person’s risk for COVID-19 and severe illness from the disease.

The findings are reported in a pair of studies published Oct. 14 in the journal Blood Advances.

In one, researchers compared more than 473,000 people in Denmark with COVID-19 to more than 2.2 million people in the general population.

Among the COVID-19 patients, there was a lower percentage of people with blood type O and higher percentages of those with with types A, B and AB.

The findings suggest that people with A, B or AB blood may be more likely to be infected with COVID-19 than people with type O blood. Infection rates were similar among people with types A, B and AB blood.

The other study included 95 critically ill COVID-19 patients hospitalized in Canada. Patients with type A or AB blood were more likely to require mechanical ventilation, suggesting that they had greater rates of lung injury from COVID-19.

More patients with type A and AB blood required dialysis for kidney failure, the study added.

The results suggest that COVID-19 patients with A and AB blood types may have an increased risk of organ dysfunction or failure than those with type O or B blood, according to the researchers.

They also found that while people with blood types A and AB didn’t have longer overall hospital stays than those with types O or B, on average, they were in intensive care longer, which may indicate more severe COVID-19.

“The unique part of our study is our focus on the severity effect of blood type on COVID-19. We observed this lung and kidney damage, and in future studies, we will want to tease out the effect of blood group and COVID-19 on other vital organs,” said study author Dr. Mypinder Sekhon, a clinical instructor in the Division of Critical Care Medicine at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, Canada.

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