Each year, cardiovascular disease kills more Americans than cancer.
Traditional risk factors for cardiovascular disease include age, family history, elevated cholesterol levels, diabetes, high blood pressure, and smoking. More recently, researchers have begun to explore the potential role of genetic information in predicting which patients are at risk for cardiac events.
They found that genetic variation at chromosome 9p21.3 is associated with cardiovascular disease.
To determine if incorporating information on this genetic variation into risk prediction would improve predictions based on non-genetic risk factors alone, researchers looked at more than 22,000 initially healthy white women enrolled in the Women's Genome Health Study. Researchers followed the women prospectively over a median of 10.2 years for incident cardiovascular disease.
They found that information about this genetic variation did not improve prediction over the traditional risk factors alone.
By American College of Physicians
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