Predisposition for Cholera of Individuals With O Blood Group Possible Evolutionary Significance

Abstract

At the Matlab Hospital of the International Centre for Diarrhoeal Disease Research, Bangladesh, the authors examined the blood groups of patients hospitalized between January and September 1979 for diarrheal disease due to a variety of bacterial and viral agents. A significant association was identified only for cholera, in which cholera patients were twice as likely to have blood group O and one-ninth as likely to have blood group AB as community controls. A follow-up study of family contacts of cholera patients, carried out between September 1980 and July 1982, indicated that blood group did not affect an individual's risk of having a culture-proven infection with V. cholerae 01 but was directly related to the severity of disease. Individuals with the most severe diarrhea compared with those with asymptomatic infection were more often of blood group O (68% versus 36%, p less than 0.01) and less often of AB (0% versus 7%, p less than 0.01). It was not possible to identify the molecular basis for this genetically related protection using biologic models of cholera that are currently available. The constant selective pressure of cholera against people of O blood group may account in part for the extremely low prevalence of O group genes and the high prevalence of B group genes found among the people living in the Gangetic Delta.

Evolution of the human ABO polymorphism by two complementary selective pressures

“…This frequency dependence will maintain host polymorphism when several mutational changes are required for bacteria to adapt to particular host genotypes. Evidence for these assumptions comes from the observation that the severity of disease is associated with ABO phenotype in several highly pathogenic bacteria, including Vibrio cholerae (Glass et al 1985;Swerdlow et al 1994), Escherichia coli O157 (Blackwell et al 2002), Campylobacter jejuni (Ruiz-Palacios et al 2003) and Shigella species (Sinha et al 1991). Some mucosal bacteria express terminal glycan-specific glycosidases that in Shigella have been shown to correlate with virulence (Prizont & Reed 1991).…”

Is blood group associated with mortality in Crimean-Congo Hemorrhagic Fever?

“…18,19 In a study performed on children infected with Plasmodium falciparum, rosette formation in erythrocytes was decreased in children with 0 blood groups, as compared to children with non-0 blood groups; in addition, vaso-occlusion and severe disease were found to be associated with blood groups. 20,21 The presence of valid information on the distribution of blood groups among patients and in this region, which is an endemic area for CCHF, and available data on specific blood groups in the patient population, is of critical importance.…”

Host-Pathogen Interactions in Emerging and Re-emerging Infectious Diseases: A Genomic Perspective of Tuberculosis, Malaria, Human Immunodeficiency Virus Infection, Hepatitis B, and Cholera

“…One possible reason is that people with other blood groups secrete blood group substances that may act as inhibitors or receptor analogs of cholera toxin (24, 94). This theory is still controversial because, in some studies, people who lacked the gene for antigen secretion were not more likely to develop severe cholera (51). An attempt to find an association between HLA genes and cholera severity did not show significant results (76), and the susceptibility of gut mucosal cells to V. cholerae O1 did not vary with blood groups (51).…”