Asymptomatic forms of Covid-19 are linked to an inherited gene, according to a recent study.
People who carry a particular genetic variant are twice as likely to get sick when they contract the virus.
A discovery that could lead to new treatments or vaccines in the future.
Asymptomatic forms of Covid-19 are linked to an inherited gene, according to a recent study.
People who carry a particular genetic variant are twice as likely to get sick when they contract the virus.
A discovery that could lead to new treatments or vaccines in the future.
Why do some people get Covid-19 almost always without symptoms? A group of American researchers tried to answer this question in a study whose results have just been published in the journal Nature. This shows that people who carry a particular genetic variant are twice as likely to get sick when they contract Covid-19. According to this work, led by Professor Jill Hollenbach of the University of California and published on Wednesday, people with two copies of this variant are even eight times more likely to be asymptomatic.
If the researchers hope their discovery could open up new treatments or vaccines in the future, they cautioned that these initial findings may be limited and deserve confirmation. Partly because most of the study participants were white, and partly because the study only covered the start of the pandemic and did not include reinfections.
Database of voluntary donors
To unravel the mystery of asymptomatic forms, the researchers used a database of voluntary bone marrow donors in the United States. The latter included all types of human leukocyte antigen (HLA), molecules on the surface of most body cells, and donors. These antigens play an important role in immune defense as they interfere in particular with the detection of foreign agents such as viruses and bacteria.
Specifically, scientists asked nearly 30,000 people on the registry to self-report their Covid tests and symptoms on a mobile phone app. In this group, more than 1,400 unvaccinated people tested positive for Covid between February 2020 and the end of April 2021. Of those 1,400 people, 136 had no Covid symptoms for at least two weeks before and after testing positive. One in five of these asymptomatic people carry at least one copy of a genetic mutation called “HLA-B*15:01”.
Memory of other seasonal viruses
To find out why some don’t show symptoms, the team did a separate study on their T cells, which protect the body from infections. The researchers specifically studied how T cells remember viruses they have encountered before. However, when people carrying the HLA mutation first encountered the Covid virus, their T cells were especially ready to replicate because they remembered other seasonal viruses that they had previously warded off.
Conclusion: Recent exposure to the common cold and other coronaviruses may thus lead to a reduction in Covid symptoms. We remind you that this theory has already been put forward to explain why children often get rid of the worst symptoms of Covid.
- Immunization of children begins to catch up with the backlog accumulated during the Covid pandemic
By comparison, according to previous studies, at least 20% of the millions infected during the pandemic were asymptomatic.
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Source: TF1