Hamilton researchers have found a way to improve a long standing test used to predict early onset heart disease.
Testing for a single rare genetic defect has been the only way to determine risk — until now.
“We might find a mutation that can cause familial hypercholesterolemia in about 10 per cent of patients. Essentially this is leaving us with 90 per cent of people for which we can not identify an early cause of why they suffer from disease,” said principal author Dr. Guillaume Paré.
The team at the Population Health Research Institute of Hamilton Health Sciences, however, has discovered that testing multiple genetic variations can help predict coronary artery disease in five times as many patients.
“Perhaps there are some people who have just been unlucky, and it turns out they have a narrative — multiple risk variants that are individually weak, but when you combine them together it results in a much higher risk of having early disease,” Paré said.
The study shows that this method identified one in 53 cases of early onset heart disease, where the single genetic test identified one in 256.
The research is published in the American Heart Association’s journal Circulation: Cardiovascular Genetics.
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