Researchers from Great Britain showed that smoking increases the risk of hard leakage and death from COVID-19. The work of scientists was published in Thorax magazine.
Certificates of the influence of the patient’s smoking during coronavirus infection remain contradictory, specialists from Bristol and Oxford Universities are noted in their article, and most studies conducted were observational and did not establish causal dependence. To assess her, the researchers combined the analysis of these observations with Mendelian randomization – by the method where to establish the effect of risk factor on the outcome of the disease as variables are used by genetic options.
Scientists analyzed health data more than 421 thousand patients, who in 2006-2010 became participants in the UK Biobank study, and the genotype of which, as a result, was known. More than 13 thousand people did a PCR test. Coronavirus infection has revealed 1649 people. 968 of them were hospitalized, 444 – died. At the same time, only four percent of the total number of participants were smokers, of which were only 29 percent of them. In general, the risk of hospitalization in smokers was 80 percent higher than in healthy people.
Mendel randomization showed that the genetic susceptibility to smoking was associated with an increase in the risk of infection with a coronavirus infection by 45 percent. The risk of hospitalization during its presence increased by 60 percent, death – by 35. The predisposition to severe smoking increased the risk of infection twice, hospitalization – five times, and death – ten.