Scientists have identified a gene that doubles the risk of respiratory failure and death from COVID-19, which might explain why people of south Asian heritage are more vulnerable to the disease.
The gene, which changes the way the lungs respond to infection, is the most important genetic risk factor identified so far and is carried by about 60 percent of people with south Asian backgrounds, compared with 15 percent of those with white European backgrounds.
The finding could partly explain the excess deaths seen in some communities in the UK and the impact of COVID-19 in the Indian subcontinent.
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James Davies, a geneticist at the University of Oxford’s Radcliffe Department of Medicine who coauthored the paper, said: “The genetic factor we have found explains why some people get very seriously ill after coronavirus infection. There’s a single gene that confers quite a significant risk to people of south Asian background.”
However, other scientists cautioned that the findings needed further confirmation and that genetic explanations should not overshadow other potentially more significant socioeconomic risk factors faced by minorities in the UK, including workplace exposure and unequal access to healthcare.
The study builds on previous work that identified a large chunk of DNA that appeared to influence how severely ill people become from COVID-19, based on genetic sequencing of tens of thousands of hospital patients in the UK and other countries.
The study homed in on a single gene called LZTHL1, which was revealed to double the risk of respiratory failure and death.
The gene, which was previously unstudied, was found to act as a switch to turn on a crucial defense mechanism that prevents SARS-CoV-2 from entering epithelial cells that line the lungs.
With the high-risk version of the gene, this response was blunted, meaning that the virus would continue entering, infecting and damaging cells in the lungs for a longer period after exposure.
“Although we cannot change our genetics, our results show that the people with the higher-risk gene are likely to particularly benefit from vaccination,” Davies said. “Since the genetic signal affects the lung rather than the immune system, it means that the increased risk should be cancelled out by the vaccine.”
Davies said the findings also pointed to the possibility of new treatments targeting the lung cells’ response.
Most current treatments work by changing the way the immune system responds to the virus. The findings could offer some explanation for why south Asian populations have been worst affected in the COVID-19 pandemic.
In the UK’s second COVID-19 wave, British Office for National Statistics data showed a risk of death three to four times higher for people of Bangladeshi backgrounds, 2.5 to three times higher for those of Pakistani backgrounds and 1.5 to two times higher for Indian backgrounds compared with the general population.
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