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Background

SARS-CoV-2 infection is characterized by high contagiousness, morbidity and mortality which are accompanied by various biological changes, particularly hematological changes. Its association with blood groups has been revealed by several authors. Our overall goal was to find a link between ABO blood groups and COVID-19 in African population

Patients and Methods

We conducted a prospective, descriptive and analytical study carried out in the epidemic treatment center and the hematology laboratory of the Dalal Jamm hospital in Dakar. All patients aged over 18 years, and tested positive for SARS-CoV-2 infection by molecular biology, were included. Clinical data was provided by attending physicians.

The complete blood count was performed on NX1500 (Sysmex Japan) and blood grouping was done on the Ortho device (Ortho, Clinical Diagnostic, USA).

The data were compiled using the Microsoft Excel. Statistical analyses were performed on SPSS. The confidence interval of 95% was used for the estimations and statistical tests were considered significant when the p-value was below 0.05

Results

A total of 259 patients were recruited including 157 males and 102 females with a mean age of 56.7 years. The comorbidities were dominated by high blood pressure (28.46%) and diabetes (13.08%). The non-severe forms represented almost three-quarters of our population. The distribution of ABO groups in our population showed a predominance of group O (49.57%) followed by groups A (28.21%), B (17.09%) and AB (5.13%) (O> A> B> AB). This same formula was found in our reference sample. However, blood group A was more represented in our population compared to that of reference with a difference at the limit of significance (p = 0.055). Regarding blood groups according to clinical forms, we found that group A had twice the risk of developing a severe form [OR = 1.95; CI = 1.06-3.57; p-0.032] while the O group would be protective [OR = 0.76; CI = 0.59-0.89; p-0.02]. This trend was however lost on multivariate analysis.

Conclusion

Our study revealed that blood group A was linked to the severity of COVID-19 but this result remains to be confirmed with much larger sampling.