Absence of Association between a Long COVID and Severe COVID-19 Risk Variant of FOXP4 and Lung Cancer, 2023, Luo et al.

SNT Gatchaman

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Absence of Association between a Long COVID and Severe COVID-19 Risk Variant of FOXP4 and Lung Cancer
Luo, Yu-Si; Zhang, Ke; Cheng, Zhong-Shan

No abstract.

A recent paper titled “Genome-wide Association Study of Long COVID” (Lammi et al., 2023) has been published on the preprint server medRxiv. This groundbreaking study conducted a genome-wide association study (GWAS) on long COVID, analyzing data from approximately 6.5 thousand long COVID cases and from over 1 million population controls across 24 studies spanning 16 countries. It stands as the first and largest GWAS of long COVID to date. The study identified one independent association signal represented by a single nucleotide polymorphism (SNP) known as rs9367106, which exhibited an odds ratio of 1.65. This SNP was found to be mapped to the gene FOXP4. This remarkable discovery suggests that individuals infected with SARS-CoV2 who also carry the rs9367106 SNP have a 1.65-fold increased likelihood of experiencing long COVID.

To explore the potential relationship between rs9367106 and lung cancer, we conducted an analysis using the UK Biobank self-reported lung cancer GWAS dataset, which primarily comprises individuals of European ancestry. Additionally, we compared the association signals around the FOXP4 gene in the self-reported lung cancer GWAS with those from the severe COVID-19 GWAS of European samples and the long COVID GWAS, which includes individuals of mixed ancestries.

In conclusion, the observation of these SNPs displaying distinct eQTL patterns in different tissues suggests that diverse genetic elements within FOXP4 specifically contribute to COVID or lung cancer by influencing FOXP4 expression across different tissues.

Link | PDF (Frontiers in Genetics)
 
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