Gene Found In South Asians Double The Risk Of COVID-19 Death: Study

A specific gene found in people with South Asian ancestry could increase the risk of them dying from a COVID-19 complication, scientists said.

Researchers from the University of Oxford found that roughly 60% of people with South Asian backgrounds carrying a higher-risk version of the LZTFL1 gene have double the risk of developing respiratory failure and dying due to COVID-19. The gene is also carried by 15% of people with European heritage, according to the study published Thursday on Nature Genetics.

The LZTFL1 gene acts as a “switch” to turn on a defense mechanism in the human body that prevents the novel coronavirus from entering the epithelial cells lining the lungs. However, this response is blunted in people carrying the higher-risk version of the gene. This means the virus could enter and infect lung cells for a longer period.

“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,” Prof. James Davies, a senior author of the paper and a geneticist at Oxford University’s Radcliffe Department of Medicine, said in the study.

Davies also added that their research could help scientists develop COVID-19 treatments that target the response of the cells in the lungs.

The recent findings could offer some explanation as to why some communities reported higher rates of hospitalizations and death after getting infected with the novel coronavirus.

In England, data from the Office for National Statistics showed that people of Bangladeshi ancestry were three to four times more likely to die of COVID-19. People with Pakistani backgrounds also had a 2.5 to three times higher risk of death compared with the general population.

However, the authors of the study noted that their findings should not be used as a sole explanation for the higher rates of death and hospitalizations in certain communities. They noted that other factors, such as socioeconomic conditions, also play a role.

Nazrul Islam, a physician-epidemiologist and medical statistician for Oxford University’s Nuffield Department of Population Health, also noted that the researchers had not represented some ethnicities in the database used in the study.

“We have to be very careful in analyzing the data, questioning it repeatedly, and how we disseminate the findings. It has profound social issues,” Islam told The Guardian.