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June 18, 2020 Having one blood type rather than another can make a difference when you get Covid-19: group A is associated with a higher risk of developing the infection in a serious form, while group 0 is related to a lower danger. This is what emerges from a study published in the 'New England Journal of Medicine', an international work that speaks Italian.

In fact, the University of Milan-Bicocca played a key role in the research, together with the Asst of Monza, with the super-archive 'Storm' which collects clinical, diagnostic, therapeutic data and biological samples of patients infected with coronavirus Sars -CoV-2 hospitalized at the San Gerardo hospital in Monza and at the Desio hospital.

The Storm project (Observational study on the natural history of hospitalized patients for Sars-CoV-2) - coordinated by Paolo Bonfanti, associate professor of Infectious Diseases in Bicocca - is therefore the basis of the article that on 'Nejm' puts black on white the link between blood types and critical issues of Covid-19, the result of a collaboration between Italian and Spanish clinical research centers and German and Norwegian geneticists. 

"Covid-19 - underlined by Bicocca and San Gerardo - is a serious infection that has caused hundreds of thousands of deaths and of which little is known, both of the pathogenic aspects and of the factors related to a more serious evolution of the disease and a greater susceptibility "to develop it. "Hence the importance of the so-called 'Genome Wide Association Study (Gwas)', genetic studies in which the whole genome of the largest possible number of people affected by a particular pathology is analyzed to determine whether specific genetic variants associate with particular subgroups of patients, such as those with the most aggressive and progressive disease ".

In the research that appears today in the 'Nejm', the gene sequences of 1,610 Covid patients hospitalized in 3 Italian and 4 Spanish hospitals, all with respiratory failure, and in 2,205 people without disease (control group) were analyzed. The main result of the study is precisely "a strong association between AB0 blood groups and the tendency to have a more severe clinical picture. The work - the researchers report - shows that blood group 0 is associated with a lower risk of developing an clinically serious infection, while blood group A is associated with a higher risk. " "The reasons behind this different risk profile will be studied in depth with dedicated studies - underline the Italian authors - but the results of the study pose an important step towards understanding the pathogenetic mechanisms of a disease whose complexity constitutes one of the most important challenges of modern medicine ".

Original Article: Genomewide Association Study of Severe Covid-19 with Respiratory Failure # COVID19

- NEJM (@NEJM) June 18, 2020