COVID-19 manifests in a different way from individual to individual. While most only develop mild sickness after catching SARS-CoV-2, others may require intensive care at hospitals to survive their bout with the virus. This stark difference has led scientists to show their attention to genetics.

After analyzing the DNA of greater than 24,000 individuals who had COVID-19 and required intensive care treatment, researchers determined greater than a dozen recent genetic links that would explain the chance of developing severe illness from SARS-CoV-2 infection.

Published within the journal Nature, the findings highlight the role of the immune system not only in combating COVID-19 but in addition in other diseases and conditions that trigger various immune responses.

“These are more likely to be processes which are lively in other conditions. All the things that we have done in COVID will, I feel, be relevant to other groups of patients that we’ve not identified yet,” lead writer Kenneth Baillie, an intensive-care specialist on the University of Edinburgh, U.K., said in a report published in the identical journal.

Based on the study with greater than 2,000 authors from different parts of the world, immune genes could play a task in the chance of needing intensive care while battling COVID-19. A complete of 49 DNA sequences were found to be related to severe illness. Sixteen of them had not been reported by previous research.

Baillie and other researchers noticed that some genes affected the inflammatory responses and the activation of immune cells in the course of the infection. These processes could have damaged the lungs and reduced their capability to send oxygen to tissues.

The authors hope their findings could contribute to the event of recent therapies for COVID-19 and other diseases. Nonetheless, quite a lot of work still must be done to ascertain the common genetic variants that contribute to the manifestations of such diseases.

But for Brent Richards, the evaluation presents a deeper understanding of why some people develop severe illness from COVID-19 in comparison with others. The human geneticist at McGill University in Montreal, Canada, said, “It definitely expands our understanding of the genetic determinants of severe COVID.”

It is also undeniable that the large study showed the solidarity of scientists from different institutions within the fight against COVID-19. Alexander Hoischen lauded how researchers got here together for the project even in the event that they wouldn’t profit from it career-wise.

“A lot of them acted as purely human beings. It illustrates the degree of solidarity that we actually witnessed in COVID times,” noted the geneticist at Radboud University Medical Center in Nijmegen, the Netherlands.

Published by Medicaldaily.com