The association of ABO blood group with incidence and outcome of acute pulmonary embolism

BackgroundInvestigations on risk factors of pulmonary embolism (PE) and prevention of disease has been an interesting category in cardiovascular science. Although correlation between ABO blood type and PE has been demonstrated previously, recently association of blood type and mortality and morbidity of disease has been reported in some articles. We conducted a retrospective study for further evaluation of these possible correlations.MethodsBlood group and medical data of 230 patients with confirmed diagnosis of PE was abstracted from their medical records. We followed patients by telephone calls. Two control groups were used for data analysis. First group were blood donors and second group was comprised of our hospital staff born in the same region.ResultsAccording to previous studies data were analyzed with categorizing the patients into O and non-O and also A and non-A blood groups. In PE group, blood group A was the most common phenotype presented in 106 patients (46.1%) followed by blood group O in 58 patients (25.2%), group B in 47 (20.4%), and AB in 19 (8.2 %). In both control groups, blood group A was also the most frequent blood group (36.4% and 36.6% in blood donors control group (control group 1) and staff control group (control group 2) respectively). Patients with A blood type showed higher incidence of PE (P-value=0.002 and 0.03 for control group 1 and control group 2 respectively) and patients with O blood type had a lower rate of PE (P-value=0.009 and 0.04 for control group 1 and 2 respectively). We found non-significant increased risk of total mortality in patients with O blood type (p-value=0.06). In logistic regression analysis men with O blood type had a significant higher rate of total mortality (p-value=0.02).Statistically there were no difference between patients with diagnosed PE with O and non-O blood types according to their short term (in-hospital) and midterm (11 months follow up) mortality (p-value=0.37 and 0.25 for short term and midterm mortality respectively).