Genetic factors could determine whether or not a patient will die from Ebola.
Ebola outcomes can range from complete resistance to the infection to death from organ failure, the University of Washington Health Sciences/UW Medicine reported. These variations are not believed to be related to differences in the virus itself.
Researchers looked at mice that were infected with a rodent form of Ebola. The team found mice previously infected with the virus died, but did not develop symptoms of Ebola. In the study all of the mice lost weight in the days after initial infection; 19 percent of the mice were unfazed and made a full recovery within two weeks. Eleven percent of the subjects were partially resistant to the infection, and less than half of these rodents died.
Nineteen percent of this last group had liver inflammation without classic Ebola symptoms and 40 percent had blood that took too long to clot, which is a sign of a fatal Ebola infection.
"The frequency of different manifestations of the disease across the lines of these mice screened so far are similar in variety and proportion to the spectrum of clinical disease observed in the 2014 West African outbreak," said biologists and virologists Angela Rasmussen.
"Our data suggest that genetic factors play a significant role in disease outcome," said study leader Michael Katze from the Katze Laboratory at the University of Washington Department of Microbiology.
The team found when the virus frenzied genes involved in promoting blood vessel inflammation and cell death it usually ended in mortality. The subject who experienced more activity in genes that trigger blood vessel repair tended to survive.
"We hope that medical researchers will be able to rapidly apply these findings to candidate therapeutics and vaccines," Katze said.
The findings were published Oct. 30 in the journal Science.
