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The major genetic risk factor for severe Covid-19 is inherited from Neanderthals
- Jdjdjdjjdhebe 6y agoIs there a outwardly visible way to identify these people so they can get the vaccine first? Even if not very reliable surely it would help.
- tus88 6y agoBleeding knuckles.
- TedDoesntTalk 6y agoThis should not be downvoted in my opinion. It made me laugh out loud; something that is good for my health.
- fishtacos 6y agoDon't know if it's possible, but I can't imagine identifying external features with neanderthal genes would have the desired effect.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- florencebuzz 6y agoThat would be communism. In the United States, it’s already been decided that this will be determined by one’s wealth.
- philshem 6y agoFrom the abstract: > that is inherited from Neanderthals and is carried by around 50% of people in south Asia and around 16% of people in Europe.
- xiphias2 6y agoI filled out a questionnaire from 23andme a few months ago, it's not visible, but I can imagine them having a lot of data on people at this point.
- k__ 6y agoI read that a red beard could be a sign. (I have a red beard and 23andme confirmed my Neanderthal genes)
- Talanes 6y agoDo you have any source on that? I've always been under the impression that red beard hair was known to be caused by having a single copy of the (mostly) recessive gene that causes red hair. It was always taught as the example to how recessive doesn't always mean that the gene doesn't have an effect.
- DoreenMichele 6y agoThere might be, but it probably hasn't been studied and would be highly controversial to try to document it. To most people, that will smack of racism and have echoes of incidents where, for example, it was assumed some ethnicities naturally have lower IQs than others.
- sksnskkcahan 6y agoIt’s already widely reported that race is a major risk factor for COVID-19. I doubt fears of looking like a racist are holding people back from reporting that non-racial identifiers contribute to the disease.
- DoreenMichele 6y agoWell, I assumed the comment was being downvoted because "sounds racist." But my comment is also being downvoted. I'm not personally against identifying physical traits that would help serve as a quick-and-dirty visual test of risk assessment and I don't know what's going on with downvotes on HN beyond "there's a pandemic on and voting has been wonky all year, presumably because people are stressed out."
- Talanes 6y agoIt could also be down-voted because the idea of detecting a gene responsible for blood types visually is just silly?
- DoreenMichele 6y agoI have a genetic disorder that is predominantly Caucasian. My oldest son has the same thing. It is a Dread Disease. When I was getting divorced, I did not want to date men who were likely to be carriers because it's homozygous recessive, so if the father is a carrier there is a 50 percent chance the child will be a carrier and a 50 percent chance they will have CF. I am incapable of producing a "normal" child (and didn't know that when I was having kids). My quick and dirty genetics test to drastically reduce the odds that I was dating a carrier boiled down to "No White Men Allowed." Other ethnicities are dramatically less likely to be carriers. So it doesn't sound silly to me at all that you could take one look at someone and infer some stats about the odds of their genetic risks for a specific category.
- Exmoor 6y agoIn addition to some other good points made by respondents to your comment, I would wager that the bottleneck for identifying this gene in the general population would be orders of magnitude more significant than just handing out the vaccine based on easily identifiable risk factors (occupation, age range, etc.)
- youareostriches 6y agoCan anyone figure out corresponding rsID/SNPs to these genes?
- nextos 6y agors35044562. However, the effect is probably very small compared to environmental factors (e.g. disrupted innate immunity due to insulin resistance or obesity). The highest genetic contribution to any common disease seems HLA-B27 ~ ankylosing spondylitis, closely followed by HLA II ~ type 1 diabetes. But in these cases, still, it just explains around 15% of the variance. After these big contributors, there's a long list of genes that contribute with exponentially diminishing effect sizes. And the overall contribution of genetics never exceeds 50%. It's good to understand some disease factors, but interventions are much simpler from the environmental side of things. I'm surprised that COVID is not linked to HLA in any meaningful way. Probably the study from Pääbo is not accounting for HLA because of lack of imputed haplotypes. It's a bit of a statistics smell that there's no association whatsoever. Nothing shows up in his chr6 region in the Manhattan plot. All infectious agents have some correlation. That's the whole point of HLA, implementing different strategies against them. For example, HLA-B57 and B27 tend to be super-responders against HIV. This haplotype seems to be trading more autoimmunity risk in exchange for better protection against rapidly mutating viruses. It expanded quite quickly around Northern Europe around 10000 years ago, probably due to another pandemic.
- takeda 6y agoApologies for my ignorance, but I still don't understand, does HLA-B27 makes covid symptoms worse or better?
- nextos 6y agoWe don't know, probably it doesn't. I was simply complaining about the lack of HLA correlations in the paper, which is suspicious. Probably they didn't type or impute HLA haplotypes. My HLA-B27 example was actually a positive one. It gives you higher chances of a good outcome if infected by HIV. Another paper, with a small sample size, claims HLA-B44 and C01 are susceptible [1]. I work with the Oxford vaccine group, and I am quite interested in this effect, including in vaccinated patients. It's pretty well known bad vaccine efficiency and side effects will correlate very strongly with HLA, and with thymic involution. Sadly everything is quite chaotic at the minute and it's difficult to get samples and funding for these ideas. If we were more advanced, we would get be classifying vulnerable patients and asking them to shield according to HLA and immunoageing/dysfunction markers. [1] https://www.mdpi.com/1422-0067/21/15/5205 https://www.mdpi.com/1422-0067/21/15/5205
- iends 6y agoMy 23andMe profile says I have a larger than average amount of Neanderthal DNA. How can I see if I have the risk factors in this study?
- jmnicolas 6y agoI know a 65 yo woman who has diabetes, had a cancer and has cardiac problems. Her cardiologist told her "stay home, because if you get COVID you will die". She caught it in march or April, stayed in bed for 15 days. She fully recovered. I saw her this summer, if she didn't tell me I wouldn't have guessed she had it. So don't worry too much, even if you're a big risk death isn't guaranteed apparently ;)
- crankyoldcrank 6y agoCareful, you're starting to sound like a COVID denier. Next thing you'll know you'll be saying restaurants shouldn't be closed for a year and families should be allowed to gather for Thanksgiving! Say bye to your karma then
- bawolff 6y agoObviously not. There is no 100% in probability in real life. That doesn't change the risk calculation.
- thombat 6y agoSome of the hedgehogs that bumble across the highway arrive safely at the other side.
- DoreenMichele 6y agoand one region on chromosome 9 that determines ABO blood groups. Rather than wasting many paragraphs talking about the Neanderthal connection, it would be vastly more useful to determine exactly what these genes do and why they are a risk factor for the disease. The disease significantly impacts the blood. If we can determine, for example, what blood groups it impacts the worst, that might be meaningful -- a lot more meaningful than "There's a Neanderthal connection."
- anonu 6y agoNice point. Would you argue that authors of this paper are incentivized to sensationalize the headline for eyeballs?
- DoreenMichele 6y agoMy general understanding is that studies like this tend to be a case of "We studied what we could get funded for, even if it wasn't exactly what we really wanted to know." Beyond that, I don't know and don't care about that end of things, really. I'm much more interested in this end of things where I have a smidgen of influence -- that being "What do we see as a priority in discussing the problem on HN?" because HN attracts a lot of brilliant and connected people, so I imagine if we come up with a better mental model for solving the problem here, it will proliferate.
- svara 6y agoThe last author Svante Pääbo's group has been working on Neanderthal genome sequencing for roughly two decades now. It's basic research into the evolutionary history of our species. They certainly didn't secretly want to work on infectious diseases all along. Besides, where do you get the idea that getting funded to work on the Neanderthal genome is easier than getting funded to work on an ongoing pandemic? Not that Pääbo needs it, as a Max Planck director he doesn't need to apply for grants. What's happening here is simply that the world's Neanderthal genome experts continue working on Neanderthal genomes, and when they find something that is related to the pandemic it ends up in Nature and the popular press.
- johncena33 6y ago> The highest carrier frequency occurs in Bangladesh, where more than half the population (63%) carries at least one copy of the Neanderthal risk haplotype and 13% is homozygous for the haplotype. As a Bangladeshi now living outside of the country, I am not sure what to make of it. We didn't have any proper lockdown AFAIK. In a country with huge amount of poor populace, it's almost impossible to do mandate people to stay in home when they don't have means to live. Thus COVID is very widespread, although not reported because of lack of testing. Even with all that, COVID didn't cause much harm to the population. Albeit, all of it is ancedotal.
- ImaCake 6y agoProbably helps that Bangladesh’s population pyramid tends to towards the young. So there just aren’t that many old people to get sick and die. Of course, this disease is just subtle enough that it might fly under the radar without statistics to bring its havoc to light.
- jariel 6y agoAverage age Bangledesh: 27, USA, 37, also, my bet is the curve drops hard at the older echelons, and since 85% of deaths are among the elderly, COVID just finds it hard to kill a lot of people in those places.
- neves 6y agoSo it is even more impressive that more blacks die of covid then whites. Blacks usually don't have Neanderthal genes. Racism and inequality are awful.
- tzs 6y ago> Blacks usually don't have Neanderthal genes That brings to mind a naming question. Most researchers seem to put the identical ancestors point (also known as the all common ancestors point or the genetic isopoint) for humans at somewhere in the last 20k years. That's the point where every single human alive either had no descendants who are alive today or everyone alive today is their descendant. Since the Neanderthals were extinct long before the identical ancestor point, it follows that if anyone alive today is descended from Neanderthals, then everyone alive today is descended from Neanderthals. The naming question: is there a word or term for when person A is a descendant of person B but does not have any genes from B? I've heard of someone using the term "homeopathic descendant" for this, but I think that was offered as a joke.
- itronitron 6y agoThe visual analogy that comes to mind is representing each person in the first generation as a randomly selected half deck of playing cards, second generation is a random selection of their parents cards, and so on.
- nradov 6y agoIf the genetic risk factor is so common in South Asians then why has the infection fatality rate been so low in parts of India? https://mumbaimirror.indiatimes.com/coronavirus/news/sero-survey-finds-antibodies-in-57-of-those-tested-in-slums/articleshow/77231626.cms https://mumbaimirror.indiatimes.com/coronavirus/news/sero-su...
- goodside 6y agoProbably because India’s median age is below 30: https://ourworldindata.org/age-structure https://ourworldindata.org/age-structure
- _ph_ 6y agoThanks for the link. One should weight the Corona impact with the the age distribution for each country. And for a lot of countries this correlates very well. Interestingly, Japan has very few Corona problems despite having one of the oldest population.
- gedy 6y agoMany fear nuclear war, but I'm now more fearful of future bioweapon viruses that can incapacitate targeted populations leaving the attacking nation relatively unharmed. The new "strategic warfare". Feels like Pandora's box is open.
- draugadrotten 6y agoThere was a former MI6 boss mumbling about something like that this summer. https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2020/06/03/exclusive-coronavirus-began-accident-disease-escaped-chinese/ https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2020/06/03/exclusive-corona...
- fermienrico 6y agoViruses engineered to kill people do not spread as fast. It needs a host, a living one to be able to spread effectively unless you bomb a whole country at once with bio-bombs. You might as well use nuclear weapons then. Ebola has a very high death rate but doesn't spread as fast. A virus doesn't have some internal goal to kill humans. It'd rather not kill the host, it'd rather spread as far and wide as it can; speaking from the evolutionary standpoint. A well engineered bioweapon would be a virus that goes undetected for a few months and then happens to kill the host due to complications. That can wipe out an entire country or possibly the whole human race. I don't think this is possible biologically.
- generalizations 6y ago> Viruses engineered to kill people do not spread as fast. It needs a host, a living one to be able to spread effectively... All it needs is a long period when the host is contagious and asymptomatic. That way it spreads easily before killing the host.
- fermienrico 6y agoThat's what I said in the second bit: > A well engineered bioweapon would be a virus that goes undetected for a few months and then happens to kill the host due to complications. That can wipe out an entire country or possibly the whole human race. I don't think this is possible biologically. "Killing the host" is not some natural thing that happens with Viruses. It's a complex process of immune system + dosage. It's not like virus has any evolutionary interest in demobilizing the host. It goes against the evolutionary pressure. That's why I said "happens to kill the host", due to complications.
- hardsoftnfloppy 6y agonow the question is, did China know this before they released the virus to stop the Hong Kong riots?
- lumberingjack 6y agoArticle says it's only killed a million people damn man we allow tobacco to be sold every day I even own a tobacco farm let me tell you it kills a lot more than this coronavirus. Yet if I keep lobbying they'll let me keep selling this poison to the masses laughing my ass off. Part of the lobbying that I do is to ensure that every single tobacco death is counted correctly so many slips on a pack of cigarettes and dies and they market tobacco as the death it's my job to make sure that that is corrected. Imagine all of the covid deaths they're marking just because shortage of supply. There's no me to lobby for covid ensuring every death marked by the virus is actually by the virus. I keep seeing stories where a person dies from something completely unrelated to virus yet the doctors blamed covid.
- Bancakes 6y ago"Only" a million and a half 100% preventable Covid deaths. Unlike tobacco, a single deep cough puts people in danger.
- AndrewUnmuted 6y agoActually, tobacco was only the first in a line of fear-mongering tactics centered around the idea that merely breathing can cause death and despair all around you. [0] It may have began with cigarettes, but here we are now with COVID-19. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Passive_smoking https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Passive_smoking