Non-Causal Effects of Asthma on COVID-19 Susceptibility and Severity

Frontiers in Genetics

Jing Ni¹  Kang-Jia Yin²  Gui-Xia Pan²  Bin Wang²  Li-Juan Qiu³ 

[1] Department of Epidemiology and Biostatistics, School of Public Health, Anhui Medical University, Hefei, China;Inflammation and Immune Mediated Diseases Laboratory of Anhui Province, Hefei, China;Medical Insurance Office, The Fourth Affiliated Hospital of Anhui Medical University, Hefei, China;

关键词: asthma;    moderate-to-severe asthma;    COVID-19;    susceptibility;    severity;    Mendelian randomization;   

DOI  :  10.3389/fgene.2021.762697

来源: DOAJ

【 摘 要 】

Background: Asthma is observationally associated with an increased risk of COVID-19, but the causality remains unclear. We aim to determine whether there is a casual role of asthma in susceptibility to SARS-CoV-2 infection or COVID-19 severity.Methods: Instrumental variables (IVs) for asthma and moderate-to-severe asthma were obtained from publicly available summary statistics from the most recent and largest genome-wide association study (GWAS), including 394 283 and 57 695 participants of European ancestry, respectively. The corresponding data for COVID-19 susceptibility, hospitalization and severe-disease were derived from the COVID-19 Host Genetics Initiative GWAS meta-analysis of up to 1 683 768 individuals of European descent. Causality was inferred between correlated traits by Mendelian Randomization analyses. Inverse-variance weighted method was used as the primary MR estimates and multiple alternate approaches and several sensitivity analyses were also conducted.Results: Our MR analysis revealed no causal effects of asthma on COVID-19 susceptibility, hospitalization or severe disease, with odds ratio (OR) of 0.994 (95% CI: 0.962–1.027), 1.020 (95% CI: 0.955–1.089), and 0.929 (95% CI: 0.836–1.032), respectively. Furthermore, using genetic variants for moderate-to-severe asthma, a similar pattern of results was observed for COVID-19 susceptibility (OR: 0.988, 95% CI: 0.946–1.031), hospitalization (OR: 0.967, 95% CI: 0.906–1.031), and severe disease (OR: 0.911, 95% CI: 0.823–1.009). The association of asthma and moderate-to-severe asthma with COVID-19 was overall robust to sensitivity analyses.Conclusion: Genetically predicted asthma was not associated with susceptibility to, or severity of, COVID-19 disease, indicating that asthma is unlikely to be a causal factor in the development of COVID-19.

【 授权许可】

Unknown