Abstract
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A new study published in the Journal of the American College of Cardiology by researchers from the German Centre for Cardiovascular Research (DZHK) has identified six variants in the human genome that occur more frequently in coronary artery disease (CAD) and discovered that half of all 62 hereditary risk factors for CAD are also associated with entirely different diseases, such as schizophrenia, chronic inflammatory bowel disease, or migraines.
In the published research, the German team performed a genome-wide association study (GWAS) comparing the genetic sequences from 42,335 people with coronary artery disease and 78,240 healthy people against 5,000 commonly occurring SNPs—many of which are already associated with other diseases.
Subsequently, the researchers wanted to examine the phenomenon that hereditary risk factors are associated with different diseases more closely—which they did in the most comprehensive analysis of this kind to date for the known 62 CAD risk factors. A third of the 62 SNPs were associated with traditional risk factors for CADs, for instance, high blood pressure or cholesterol values. While these results were not surprising, nearly half of the SNPs also play a part in completely different diseases, such as schizophrenia or migraines.