But genetic studies never had enough people of other ancestries to determine whether the same held true for other populations.Īs part of the Nature Medicine study, VA researchers were able to show that the region of DNA where this "heart attack gene" sits appears to play much less of a role in altering the risk of disease among people with African ancestry, including a majority of African Americans and many Hispanics. For more than a decade, researchers have known this gene is linked to higher chances of early and more severe heart disease in white, South Asian, and East Asian populations. In 2007, researchers identified a gene termed the "heart attack gene" that can lead to up to a 50% lifetime chance of developing heart disease. "This was directly because of VA's Million Veteran Program."Īmong nearly 900,000 Veterans in MVP, close to 150,000 are Black and more than 70,000 are Hispanic, making MVP one of the richest sources of data available for genetic research on all people, including those from diverse racial and ethnic backgrounds. Themistocles (Tim) Assimes, a cardiologist and researcher at the VA Palo Alto Health Care System and Stanford University. "Ours is the first genetic study of coronary artery disease that had enough people of African and Hispanic descent to confirm previous findings in white people," says corresponding author Dr. To find these locations in the human genome that are linked to heart disease, researchers in the study carefully looked at the genes of nearly a quarter of a million people with heart disease and compared them to more than 840,000 people without the disease. Additionally, researchers found nearly 100 new locations on the human genome where variations appear to increase risk of coronary artery disease. With data from MVP, VA researchers in this study confirmed for the first time that many genetic variations known to heighten heart disease risk in white people have the same effect in people of African and Hispanic ancestry. Most of these were Veterans, who agreed to share their genetic and health information for research as part of VA's Million Veteran Program, also known as MVP. The Nature Medicine study, on the other hand, examined the genes of more than 27,000 Black and 12,000 Hispanic people with coronary artery disease. Research into the genetics of heart disease, like many other areas of health research, is mostly based on data from white people because of higher participation. The study was led by investigators at the Palo Alto VA and involved researchers from several other VAs across the nation. It occurs when major blood vessels to the heart muscle become narrowed or blocked, which can lead to heart attack.
Veterans with the disease.Ĭoronary artery disease is the leading cause of death in the United States, responsible for one in every five deaths.
It looked at nearly a quarter of a million cases of coronary heart disease, including more than 100,000 U.S. The genetic study - the largest to date on heart disease - was published August 1, 2022, in Nature Medicine. "It confirms that other factors are responsible for more heart disease in those populations, such as access to health care and different lived experiences," she adds. Catherine Tcheandjieu, a genetic epidemiologist at the VA Palo Alto Health Care System and University of California San Francisco. "Some groups, such as African Americans, are more likely to suffer from heart disease, and our findings indicate that's not because they have a higher genetic risk for the disease," says study author Dr. This genetic risk seems to be the same across all major racial and ethnic backgrounds, including people of European, African, Japanese, and Indigenous ancestries, the VA study found. Roughly one-third to one-half of everyone's chances for developing this type of heart disease are rooted in their genes.
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