Age is the dominant risk factor for infectious diseases, but the mechanisms linking age to infectious disease risk are incompletely understood. Age-related mosaic chromosomal alterations (mCAs) detected from genotyping of blood-derived DNA, are structural somatic variants indicative of clonal hematopoiesis, and are associated with aberrant leukocyte cell counts, hematological malignancy, and mortality. Here, we show that mCAs predispose to diverse types of infections. We analyzed mCAs from 768,762 individuals without hematological cancer at the time of DNA acquisition across five biobanks. Expanded autosomal mCAs were associated with diverse incident infections (hazard ratio (HR) 1.25; 95% confidence interval (CI) = 1.15-1.36; P = 1.8 × 10), including sepsis (HR 2.68; 95% CI = 2.25-3.19; P = 3.1 × 10), pneumonia (HR 1.76; 95% CI = 1.53-2.03; P = 2.3 × 10), digestive system infections (HR 1.51; 95% CI = 1.32-1.73; P = 2.2 × 10) and genitourinary infections (HR 1.25; 95% CI = 1.11-1.41; P = 3.7 × 10). A genome-wide association study of expanded mCAs identified 63 loci, which were enriched at transcriptional regulatory sites for immune cells. These results suggest that mCAs are a marker of impaired immunity and confer increased predisposition to infections.
About The Expert
Seyedeh M Zekavat
Shu-Hong Lin
Alexander G Bick
Aoxing Liu
Kaavya Paruchuri
Chen Wang
Md Mesbah Uddin
Yixuan Ye
Zhaolong Yu
Xiaoxi Liu
Yoichiro Kamatani
Romit Bhattacharya
James P Pirruccello
Akhil Pampana
Po-Ru Loh
Puja Kohli
Steven A McCarroll
Krzysztof Kiryluk
Benjamin Neale
Iuliana Ionita-Laza
Eric A Engels
Derek W Brown
Jordan W Smoller
Robert Green
Elizabeth W Karlson
Matthew Lebo
Patrick T Ellinor
Scott T Weiss
Mark J Daly
Chikashi Terao
Hongyu Zhao
Benjamin L Ebert
Muredach P Reilly
Andrea Ganna
Mitchell J Machiela
Giulio Genovese
Pradeep Natarajan
References
PubMed