Background:

Coronary artery disease (CAD) is a globally prevalent disease with high mortality rate. Pakistan suffers equally from a great burden of disease and it is anticipated that its toll may rise further by at least 50 % in the coming years. Therefore, a lot of work has been done on its associated risk factors. Of them, one potential unmodifiable factor that has been under consideration in recent times which has an impact on CAD, is ABO blood groups. Researchers are extensively working on ABO blood groups with regard to its association with CAD and have achieved remarkable results. Pakistani literature in this regard is scarcely present, so this study aims to explore the association of ABO with CAD, using angiographs as a gold standard tool for diagnosing CAD.

Materials and Method:

This cross sectional study consists of 138 subjects of both the genders. After taking written consent, patients with angiographs having stenosis of more than 50% of one, two or three arteries were enrolled for the study and labeled as 1VD, 2VD and 3VD respectively. Involvement of left main artery was considered as presence or absence of left main stenosis. The blood groups of the subjects were determined using conventional tube agglutination method.

Results:

This study shows that A+ blood group was prevalent in all the coronary artery disease patients, showing its preponderance towards CAD, which is consistent with the findings of most of the Western researches. However, this study predicts that O+ blood group is the 2^nd most frequent group in CAD subjects after A+, whereas according to a lot of Western studies, O blood group is considered as protective for CAD.

Conclusion:

Genetic studies are now required in this domain to help in evaluating the genetic polymorphisms that are occurring in the population related to ABO gene.