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. 2022 May 30;11(11):1792.
doi: 10.3390/cells11111792.

HLA Allele Frequencies and Association with Severity of COVID-19 Infection in Northern Italian Patients

Franca Rosa Guerini  1 , Elisabetta Bolognesi  1 , Agata Lax  1 , Luca Nicola Cesare Bianchi  1 , Antonio Caronni  1 , Milena Zanzottera  1 , Cristina Agliardi  1 , Maria Paola Albergoni  2 , Paolo Innocente Banfi  1 , Jorge Navarro  1 , Mario Clerici  1   3
Affiliations

HLA Allele Frequencies and Association with Severity of COVID-19 Infection in Northern Italian Patients

Franca Rosa Guerini et al. Cells. .

Abstract

HLA allelic distribution was analysed in a cohort of 96 Northern Italian subjects (53M/43F) (mean age 59.9 ± 13.3 years) from Lombardy who developed COVID-19 during the first two pandemic waves to investigate possible correlations between HLA molecules and disease severity. An important role of HLA- B and HLA-C loci in modulating the clinical severity of COVID-19 disease was identified. In particular, the HLA-B07 supertype was observed to be associated with a significant risk for severe disease; conversely, the HLA-B27 supertype and C*12:02 allele played a protective role as they were associated with milder disease. These associations were confirmed after applying a multinomial regression analysis to adjust the correlation for age, gender and comorbidities with COVID-19 severity. Though the power of results is limited by the small sample size, data herein contribute to shedding light on the role played by genetic background in COVID-19 infection.

Keywords: COVID-19; HLA; SARS-CoV-2; disease severity.

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Conflict of interest statement

The authors declare no conflict of interest.

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