Studies find gene links to heart attack

LONDON: Scientists have discovered 13 new variants of genes that increase a person's risk of developing heart disease, the number one killer in the world, in a series of major international genetic research.
Opening of the 13 previously unknown variations of the gene and confirmation of around 10 more have to offer clues about how heart disease such as coronary heart disease to develop, and lead to new and more effective treatments, researchers say.
The results also show it can be someone who stands in profile mapping genetic variants of heart problems, as part of routine clinical care in the future, with an eye to be able to offer more personalized prevention or treatment plans.
"With this information we should be able to better identify people at high risk early in life and quickly take action to offset that increased risk," said Themistocles Assimes Stanford University School of Medicine in the United States, one of many scientists from all over world who worked on the study.
"Although we may soon become a reality in the day, we probably need to reliably identify many other options ... for the next few years before it becomes useful to carry out this genetic profiling in the doctor's office."
According to the World Health Organization (WHO), cardiovascular diseases are the leading cause of death worldwide, claiming 17.1 million lives a year. Billions of dollars are spent each year on medical devices and drugs to treat them.
Lifestyle factors such as smoking, alcohol consumption, unhealthy diet and lack of exercise are known to increase the risk of heart attacks and strokes, but the researchers also studied the DNA of the map to find genes that may also put people at higher cardiovascular risk.
For this study, published together with two additional papers on heart disease risk variants in the journal Nature Genetics on Sunday, an international consortium analyzed data from 14 previous so-called genome association studies that scanned the genetic profiles of people.
Researchers reviewed the complete genetic profile of more than 22.000 people of European descent with coronary heart disease or a history of heart attack and 60.000 healthy people - making this study about 10 times greater than the second-largest whole-genome studies to date.
Combining data from several studies is crucial to finding the gene variant risk, as the genetic architecture of cardiovascular disease is very complicated.
"Signals from the regions of these genes are all pretty thin, which makes large-scale joint prerequisite for any substantial progress", Assimes said in a statement.
The researchers said their results showed that a total of 23 variants now known, seven are related to the level of "bad" or LDL cholesterol, and one is associated with hypertension, or high blood pressure - both known risk factors for heart disease.
But others have no relation to known risk factors for cardiovascular - Scientists say finding opens up new possibilities for future research and discovery.
"The lack of apparent connection with the risk factors we know so well the source of a lot of excitement to these results," said Sekar Kathiresan of the Massachusetts General Hospital in the U.S., who worked on the study.
"If these options do not work through known mechanisms like they attach to the risk of cardiovascular disease? He suggests there are new mechanisms that we do not yet understand.