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Heart Disease Risk Factors Tell More about Health Than Gene Analysis

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Genetic tests cannot predict the likelihood of heart attacks and strokes more accurately than traditional risk factors. This was shown by a study that was published in the Journal of the American Medical Association (Mosley et al., Predictive Accuracy of a Polygenic Risk Score Compared With a Clinical Risk Score for Incident Coronary Heart Disease). The traditional risk factors for cardiovascular diseases include blood pressure, cholesterol levels, smoking, diabetes mellitus.

Early detection of the risk of developing cardiovascular diseases helps to prevent deadly conditions - heart attack and stroke. This requires a timely change in lifestyle and, in certain cases, the beginning of preventive treatment.

There are several calculators available to assess the risk of cardiovascular diseases. The most famous of them is based on traditional risk factors. Previously, a number of studies have identified many gene variants that are associated with the likelihood of heart and vascular diseases. But the authors of the new scientific work emphasize that such a connection does not always show that the disease will really develop in the future.

Scientists decided to compare these two methods of predicting heart attacks and strokes. They used data from two large studies of atherosclerosis: for more than seven thousand people, both genetic and standard risk factors were known.

The authors of the study tested how accurately two algorithms predict the development of diseases within 15 years: genetic and standard.

Genetic analysis and a calculator of standard risk factors gave similar results. People who had the highest risk of cardiovascular disease on both scales were more likely to develop a heart attack and stroke. The genetic method did not show any advantages.

"Genetics is important for determining hereditary diseases and as a key tool for understanding human biology. The idea that genetics can play a role in predicting common diseases in humans has been on the minds for several years. But now she cannot present a routine method of predicting cardiovascular diseases," he said Thomas J. Wang from the University of Texas, co-author of the study.

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