Genética da doença cardíaca: overrated!

Li, somente o resumo que pode ser visto clicando o título feito pela Reuters sobre artigos a serem publicados amanhã no Science. Na famosa disputa "nature versus nurture", não nego minha preferência pela explicação social e ambiental para as doenças cardiovasculares e diabetes. As variações temporais rápidas e os estudos de migrantes que "adotam" a incidência do novo local são exemplos que que as explicações genéticas da etiologia das doenças cardíacas são sempre overrated como gostam de afirmar os americanos para pessoas e instituições cujo valor real é inferior ao propagado. Por outro lado, as perspectivas de novos fármacos a partir desses novos conhecimentos são muito grandes.

DNA mutation causes heart disease in whites By Maggie Fox, Health and Science Editor WASHINGTON (Reuters) - A treasure hunt for genes has found that up to three-quarters of people of European descent have DNA that raises their risk for heart disease -- and these genes are close to a stretch of DNA linked to diabetes. The findings, made by two independent groups of researchers, may help explain why so many people have heart disease even if they do not have clear risk factors such as smoking, high cholesterol or high blood pressure. And they could lead to a test to predict the risk of heart disease, the biggest cause of death across the globe. "I think this is a stunner," Dr. Francis Collins, director of the National Human Genome Research Institute, told reporters. "It seems like this one place carries all of that weight for two very common and very dangerous diseases." Both teams used a new method of combing the genome for disease genes called a genome-wide association study, which was not possible until the full human genome was published in 2003. Now scientists can map the DNA of people with a disease, compare them to this template genome or to people without a disease, and find what is different. The two studies, using 40,000 people, found the same thing -- a stretch of DNA called 9q21 carried certain mutations in people with heart disease. It is an area that had not previously been identified as a gene, which may make it more difficult to determine how it causes disease, scientists said.