What's your genetic risk of heart disease?
Heart disease is the single leading cause of death in Australia, with risk of disease development calculated through indicators such as blood pressure, cholesterol and smoking, as well as family history.
But although about half of heart disease risk is inherited, genetics are not featured in current approaches to risk calculation — at least, not yet.
Dr Gad Abraham and Associate Professor Mike Inouye — computational biologists from the University of Melbourne — have contributed to an international project to develop a risk score that predicts coronary heart disease based on DNA profiles. Their study was funded by the Heart Foundation and NHMRC and has been published in the European Heart Journal.
“Traditional scores can identify people at very high risk, but without an understanding of the genetics, we still fail to identify a large proportion of people who are going to develop heart disease over the next 10 years,” said Dr Abraham.
Dr Abraham and Associate Professor Inouye developed a score based on more than 49,000 single-nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) — single letters in the human genome sequence that commonly vary from person to person. They found that integrating this information with known risk factors improved their ability to predict the risk of developing heart disease 10 years into the future, especially for people over 60 years of age.
The researchers were also able to identify the top 20% of men who were at high lifetime risk, leading to disease 12–18 years earlier than men at the bottom 20% of risk. These high-risk individuals could be candidates for early intervention.
“If an individual has a high genomic risk of CHD they may choose to change their diet or exercise habits or be prescribed lipid-lowering medication earlier than an individual at low genomic risk,” said Associate Professor Inouye.
“In addition to longer and healthier lives, stratification such as this could offer significant cost savings to the health system.”
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