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Friday, May 04, 2007US and Canadian researchers found that up to one in four white people carries the section of DNA which increases the risk of heart disease by around 40%. A separate study in Iceland found the same genetic variant was linked to a fifth of heart attacks. ...Their study of 23,000 people, showed that those who carried one copy of this allele have a moderately increased risk of heart disease. But people who have two copies, which accounts for about 20-25 % of white people, have a 30 to 40% higher risk of heart disease than individuals who carry no copies. When we hear the words "genetic" or "gene" we tend to assume an absolute association - the way we assume eye color, hair color, and dwarfism or other traditional genetic diseases are determined by genes. If you've got the gene, you've got the trait or problem. If you don't, you don't. But now that we can map the genome, genetics is a little more complicated than that. Here are the results in tabular fashion. The genes in question don't appear to be overwhelmingly present in the heart attack subjects vs. the control subjects. Unless I'm reading the tables wrong, they appear in about 8-10% more coronary artery disease patients than they do in the control subjects without heart disease. In other words, the gene is a risk factor, but not a determinant. Which is why the quoted researchers were careful to say things like this: Professor Ruth McPherson, of the University of Ottawa Heart Institute, who worked on the study, said: "The effect is less than that of smoking or having a high cholesterol level. posted by Sydney on 5/04/2007 08:41:00 AM 0 comments 0 Comments: |
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