This article is more than 5 years old. Information may no longer be current.
VIDEO: Expert discusses role of genetics in early-age MI
Click Here to Manage Email Alerts
PHILADELPHIA — In this Cardiology Today video exclusive, Sekar Kathiresan, MD, cardiologist at Massachusetts General Hospital and human geneticist at the Broad Institute, discusses the role of genetics in patients who experience MI at a young age.
Kathiresan and colleagues reviewed individuals who presented with MI before the age of 50 to assess what proportion of those patients had MI with a genetic cause.
“There is probably about 1 out of the 100 who actually carries both the monogenic and the polygenic risk,” Kathiresan said. “For those at monogenic risk, the risk elevation is about fourfold. For those at polygenic risk, the risk is about twofold higher risk [for MI] and that rare patient who might have both, the risk is additive at about a sixfold increased risk for [MI].”
According to Kathiresan, the question for physicians what to do once a patient is known to have high genetic CV risk.
Lifestyle and medication interventions including statin therapy may offset underlying inherited risk, he said.
“A favorable lifestyle can cut somebody's inherited risk by more than half,” Kathiresan said. “Similarly, statin therapy can reduce risk by about 40% to 50% as well, so we're now in a position not only to find those at high genetic risk, but [to] offer interventions to potentially reduce that risk.”