Blood group associations with parasites, bacteria, and viruses

Association of ABO and Rh blood groups to HBV, HCV infections among blood donors in a blood bank of tertiary care teaching hospital in Southern India: A retrospective study

“…With the help of scientific evidence it can be correlated that the level of natural antibodies resistance against the viral antigens depends on the individual's blood group 26 and Group O individuals were more resistant to dangerous sequelae of acute viral hepatitis. 27 A disproportionate excess of blood group O was found in our study. It is, however, important to point out that the results obtained in our study do not reflect the prevalence of HBsAg and anti-HCV in the unselected general population because blood donors are a pre-selected group and most of them are within the sexually active age group.…”

Widespread balancing selection and pathogen-driven selection at blood group antigen genes

“…This hypothesis had previously been formulated for ABO and FUT2 (Greenwell 1997;Hill 2006;Casanova and Abel 2007), while in the case of GYPC, DARC, and SLC4A1 the ability of specific alleles to modulate infection susceptibility has been demonstrated for malaria (Moulds and Moulds 2000). Also, in the case of AQP3, modulation of malaria severity can be hypothesized since AQP3 represents the major channel for glycerol transport in human erythrocytes (Roudier et al 2002), and mice knockout for Aqp9, a related glycerol transporting aquaporin, display increased survival to P. berghei (Liu et al 2007).…”

“…In particular, the association between infections and BGA polymorphisms has been extensively investigated, although conclusive results have been obtained in a minority of cases. For example, specific BGA alleles have been shown to alter susceptibility to malaria (Moulds and Moulds 2000), while FUT2 variants (Lewis system) influence the predisposition to Norwalk virus (Lindesmith et al 2003) and Campylobacter (Ruiz-Palacios et al 2003) infection, as well as to vulvovaginal candidisis (Hurd and Domino 2004) and urinary tract infections (Schaeffer et al 2001).…”

Association of ABO Blood Group and Malaria Parasitic Infection in Eiedbabkier, Sudan

“…Since their discovery, ABO antigen associations with infections and other diseases have been the subject of hundreds of publications. [6,7] Several studies were conducted to investigate the association between ABO blood group system and some disease conditions. [8] A and B blood group antigens are trisaccharidesbound to a variety of glycoproteins and glycolipids on the surface of red blood cells, and these trisaccharides are thought to act as receptors for rosetting on uninfected red blood cells and bind to parasite rosetting ligands such as PfEMP-1 and sequestrin However, blood group antigens A and B are not expressed in blood group O individuals.…”