Stress and heart attack due to nucleotide replacement
The Deadly Stress Gene
Scientists have found people whom stress kills more oftenGrigory Kolpakov, <url>
A report on this discovery was published in the latest issue of the journal PLOS ONE (Brummett et al., A Functional Polymorphism in the5HTR2C Gene Associated with Stress Responses Also Predicts Incident Cardiovascular Events).
As you know, stress is one of the threats to humanity in the post–industrial era, which not only affects the state of the cardiovascular system, but also causes the appearance of a whole range of other diseases. So, in one of the recent studies it was shown that stress disrupts the normal state of the body, mixing the mechanisms of the nervous and autoimmune systems and becoming, in particular, one of the causes of multiple sclerosis.
The authors of the latest study focused on heart attacks. They were worried that if, for example, a lot is said about a genetic predisposition to cancer, then no genetic predisposition to heart disease has been known to date. The Duke University team led by Professor Redford Williams has been dealing with this issue for a long time. Last year, they managed to find a genetic mutation, the so-called single-nucleotide polymorphism (when only one letter changes in the DNA sequence) in the serotonin receptor gene, which leads to a hyperreaction to stress.
Scientists said then that in the blood of men with this genetic variant, the content of cortisol, which is called the stress hormone, is twice as high. This hormone is synthesized in the adrenal glands when the body is faced with a sharp change in conditions and mobilizes to fight.
Using a database collected at Duke University regarding 6 thousand patients, among whom 13% had this defect in their genome, scientists found that these people were more likely to have a heart attack and 38% more likely to die from it than those who did not have this mutation.
Data on patients were collected for six years, and the mentioned 38% specialists calculated, excluding dependence on age, degree of obesity, bad habits, such as smoking and other diseases. They also found no gender differences.
"This discovery needs to be confirmed by another independent experiment. It is also necessary to assess how the stress hormone affects different segments of the population," says Peter Kaufmann, deputy director of the Department of Clinical Applications and Disease Prevention at the National Heart, Lung and Blood Institute (US National Institutes of Health). – In the future, this study may help identify more effective and intensive strategies for preventing cardiovascular diseases.
It is not yet clear how the genetic defect discovered by Duke scientists leads to heart problems. Now they are working on a hypothesis according to which, with an increase in the level of cortisol in the blood, the level of another hormone increases – MMR9, which makes the walls of blood vessels more susceptible to rupture and the formation of blood clots, which, in turn, increases the risk of heart attack and death from it.
Portal "Eternal youth" http://vechnayamolodost.ru20.12.2013