https://academic.oup.com/jid/advance-article/doi/10.1093/infdis/jiaa224/5826991
There is an urgent unmet need to understand why some people develop severe disease. Heritable differences are known to modulate individual susceptibility to and severity of infectious disease. We hypothesized that a genetic variant of IFITM3 was associated with the severity of COVID-19, specifically the SNP rs12252. This genetic variant is common in Asian populations and homozygosity for the C allele has been associated with influenza severity. IFITM3 encodes an immune effector protein critical to viral restriction and acts to restrict membrane fusion. It is currently unknown whether IFITM3 shows genetic association with the severity of COVID-19.
Mild disease (n=56) was defined as patients with fever, respiratory symptoms and pneumonia from imaging. Patients with severe disease (n=24) were those who in addition developed significant tachypnoea, hypoxia, respiratory failure or other organ failure. The patient cohort was broadly representative of published clinical reports in the outbreak to date in terms of case mix and severity.
To test if the homozygous C-allele carriers associate with the severity of COVID-19, we genotyped the cohort by sequencing a 300bp locus spanning rs12252. Among all hospitalized patients we found that 35% were homozygous for the CC allele (46.25% CT heterozygotes and 18.75% TT homozygotes). We found a significant difference between mild and severe cases adjusting for age on regression analysis, with homozygosity for the C allele (CC vs CT/TT) associated with disease severity (p = 0.00093; OR = 6.37; Table 2). In addition, two of the three patients who died carried the CC genotype. However, the frequency of CC genotype (28.6%) observed in our mild patient groups is similar to general Beijing population (26.2%) according to g1000data base
years ago about just the flu
fyi
valley fever is a lung fungal infection usually obtained by breathing in fungal spores in parts of calif or arizona
60 % usually resolve with mild flu like symptoms, but it can be severe pneumonia, and even disseminate to other parts of the body/meningitis, requiring substantial long term treatment, sometimes amputation or death. pregnancy, immune deficiency, diabetes, age, are factors. severity is greatest in some ethnic groups, primarily filipino and african americans...i wonder if severity is like coronavirus and based partially on genetics...
here is some info i find it interesting and possibly some parallels to coronavirus.
https://wwwnc.cdc.gov/eid/article/5/5/99-0508_article
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3012635/
I survived a non-disseminated but severe pneumonia case of valley fever, probably aggravated by use of cortisone-immune system suppressant two days prior to inhaling spores when I was caught in a freak multiple dust devil storm at dusk in kern county farmland, fortunately my primary care doctor diagnosed it immediately! I had to take fluconazole for a whole year and had my blood titer levels checked regularly. My specialist had recently lost two patients, a doctor and his son to valley fever. Needless to say coronavirus concerns me greatly having had a possible similar experience before.