Researchers find dementia gene mutation doubles risk of severe COVID-19 infection
An international team of researchers from the University of Exeter Medical School (Exeter), UK, and the University of Connecticut School of Medicine (UConn Medicine), US, have found high risk of severe COVID-19 infection among participants of European ancestry who carry two faulty copies of the apolipoprotein E (APOE) gene – the APOE gene is involved in fat metabolism in the body; faulty variants of the gene are known to increase risks of Alzheimer’s disease and heart disease.
The team found that people with a particular APOE genotype were at double the risk of developing severe COVID-19, compared to those with the common form of the APOE gene. According to the researchers, whoanalysed health and genetic data from nearly 382,000 people in the UK Biobank study, at least one in 36 people of European ancestry have two faulty copies of the APOE gene.
Dr. Chia-ling Kuo, of the UConn School of Medicine, said: “This is an exciting result because we might now be able to pinpoint how this faulty gene causes vulnerability to COVID-19. This could lead to new ideas for treatments. It also shows that increasing disease risks that appear inevitable with ageing might actually be due to specific biological differences, which could help us understand why some people stay active to age 100 and beyond, while others become disabled and die in their sixties, for example.”
Similarly, Exeter’s Professor David Melzer said the findings “suggest that the high risk of developing COVID-19 may not simply be due to the effects of dementia, advancing age or frailty, or exposure to the virus in care homes.”
The majority of people in the population – and among study participants – have not yet been exposed to the virus. In this analysis, 2.36% of participants with European ancestries had the APOE(variant e4e4) faulty gene; and 5.13% of those who tested positive for COVID-19 had this gene variant, suggesting a higher risk of developing the disease.
Melzer believes the effect “could be partly due to an underlying genetic change” which puts these people at risk for both COVID-19 and dementia.
Category: Features, Health alert
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