Micro-RNAs will help predict a heart attack
Scientists: RNA in a drop of blood will help to find out if a person is in danger of a heart attack
Analysis of the concentration of small RNA molecules in human blood makes it possible to predict with high accuracy the probability of developing a heart attack and other heart problems 10 years before they occur, Norwegian doctors say in an article published in the Journal of Molecular and Cellular Cardiology (Bye et al., Circulating microRNAs predict future fatal myocardial infarction in healthy individuals – The HUNT study).
"Our study showed that observing the concentration of five different micro-RNAs and combining this information with data on classical risk factors allows us to identify those people who may soon become victims of myocardial infarction with an extremely high level of accuracy," said Anja Bye from the University of Sciences and Technology of Norway in Oslo (in the press release Your blood can reveal your risk for heart disease - VM).
Bai and her colleagues have developed a new system for diagnosing heart attacks and other heart and vascular problems, trying to understand why traditional blood tests for cholesterol levels and other prediction methods often do not help doctors predict that their patients may soon have a heart attack. On average, every fifth "core" begins to experience heart problems when nothing indicates it.
In recent years, a whole army of scientists, including Russian biologists, have been trying to create new diagnostic systems for heart and vascular diseases that predict the onset of a heart attack and other potentially fatal problems by the presence of certain proteins and signaling molecules in the blood. Such "heart attack tests" are already much more accurate than traditional methods of predicting it, but they still do not cover all cases of its development.
The authors of the article approached the solution of this problem from a slightly different angle – they suggested that the changes in the body that lead to a heart attack may affect which micro-RNAs are produced by the cells of the heart and other tissues of the circulatory system. Micro-RNAs are a special type of signaling molecules that temporarily suppress the work of certain genes, prohibiting cells from "reading" them and assembling proteins based on them.
Guided by this idea, scientists have been following the lives of two hundred Norwegians who participated in health assessment programs in 1996 and 2006 for several years, some of whom died during this time from heart attacks, while others remained alive. In total, scientists managed to find almost 180 different micro-RNAs in their blood samples, five of which were associated with the likelihood of developing a heart attack.
According to doctors, a blood test for the presence of these five types of micro-RNA, together with an assessment of traditional risk factors, can increase the accuracy of predictions from 80 to 91%, which should help doctors save thousands of lives of apparently healthy people who are at risk of heart attack today, despite their lack of bad habits and maintaining a healthy lifestyle. life.
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29.06.2016