Diet can beat heart attack gene: Study - Calcutta Telegraph
New Delhi, Oct. 12: People born with a gene that increases the risk of heart attacks may be able to counteract its effects by consuming a diet rich in fruits and raw vegetables, says a new research study released yesterday.
An international research team has found that a diet of fruits and raw vegetables appears to negate the effects of a gene called 9p21 that has been shown to increase the risk of heart attacks in several populations, including South Asians.
Although previous studies have shown the benefits of fruits and vegetables to the heart, the researchers say this is the first study to show that diet can help fight the deleterious effects of a gene that appears to play a role in heart attacks.
"It was a surprise to find that a healthy diet could significantly weaken its effect," said Jamie Engert, a team member at the McGill University Health Centre, Canada, and joint principal investigator of the study published yesterday in the journal PLoS Medicine.
The researchers say their findings support the public health message that people should consume more than five servings of fruits or vegetables a day to protect the heart.
Engert and her co-workers analysed the diet and the cardiovascular health of 8,000 people from Arab, European, South Asian, Chinese and Latin-American ethnicities and followed that up with a similar exercise involving 19,000 people in Finland.
The researchers found that people at high risk of heart attacks through the 9p21 gene who consumed large amounts of fruits and raw vegetables had a similar risk of heart attacks as people who had a version of 9p21 genes that does not pose a risk to the heart.
"The findings suggest that a diet high in vegetables and fruits may modify the expression of the 9p21 (variant associated with heart disease)," said Sonia Anand, professor of medicine and epidemiology at McMaster University in Canada, a joint principal investigator.
"But the pathway through which this genetic marker increases the risk of heart attacks is as yet unknown," Anand told The Telegraph. The 9p21 gene on human chromosome 9 was first reported by a Canadian group four years ago.
Many other research groups have studied the interactions between 9p21 and the known risk factors for heart attacks such as smoking, cholesterol or high blood pressure but no interactions had been observed — until now.
"The fact that our results were consistent across five ethnic groups and replicated in a completely separate Finnish (population) was a pleasant surprise," Anand said.
The study has found the strongest interaction of the 9p21 gene in South Asians and Latin-Americans, the same ethnic groups that have been shown to have a strong protective effect of the consumption of fruits and vegetables.
13 Oct, 2011--
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