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The liver link to coronary artery disease
Cardiovascular disease is still the leading cause of death in the United States, accounting for one in every four deaths. Every 36 seconds, someone dies of heart disease. Coronary artery disease, also called coronary heart disease, is the most common type of heart disease.
There are many ways to protect your heart. The foods you eat (and don’t eat), the amount of exercise you do and whether you smoke, all have a very real effect on your chances of becoming a heart disease statistic.
Recently, research has uncovered an intimate connection between heart health and the health of another organ, one that performs at least one hundred vital functions throughout the body.
Study provides new insight into the genetics of coronary artery disease news-medical.net - get the latest breaking news, showbiz & celebrity photos, sport news & rumours, viral videos and top stories from news-medical.net Daily Mail and Mail on Sunday newspapers.
According to a new study published in
The American Journal of Human Genetics, more than one third of genetic variants that increase the risk of coronary artery disease regulate the expression of genes in the liver. These variants have an impact on the expression of genes regulating cholesterol metabolism, among other things. The findings provide valuable new insight into the genetics of coronary artery disease. The study was conducted in collaboration between the University of Eastern Finland, Kuopio University Hospital, the University of California Los Angeles, and the University of Arizona.
Coronary artery disease (CAD) and its most important complication myocardial infarction (MI) are among the leading causes of death in the Western world. Both genetic and environmental factors contribute to the disease and recent genome-wide association studies have identified approximately 200 risk loci for CAD. However, the vast majority of such variants are located in the non-coding regions