(Medical Xpress)—Since March 2013, the avian flu virus H7N9 has infected 134 people and caused 44 deaths. Among those infected, many, but not all, patients develop severe symptoms, including pneumonia and acute respiratory distress syndrome (ARDS), that can eventually result in death. Until now, scientists have not understood why the disease affects some more severely than others. Peter Doherty and his colleagues have found that patients with high levels of certain cytokines are more likely to suffer severe lung and airway damage than patients with lower levels of these cytokines. They also discovered that patients who carry a particular variant of the gene that codes for the protein IFITM3 are more likely to suffer severe symptoms and to die than patients with other versions of the gene. The research appears in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
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