Path of hope in heart disease
MELBOURNE scientists are searching for tiny warning signs in our blood that drive up the risk of heart disease.
Their aim is to develop new tests to diagnose and treat the disease that kills one Australian every 12 minutes.
High cholesterol is known to increase the risk of heart disease, said Prof Peter Meikle from Melbourne’s Baker Heart and Diabetes Institute.
But it is just one of thousands of lipids, or minuscule fats that circulate in the body, many of which could help improve risk prediction.
Prof Meikle and colleagues in the US will analyse the blood and genes of thousands of people in the hope of finding new ‘red flags’ for the country’s biggest killer.
Prof Meikle said they will use a mass spectrometry, technology that can sort and weigh lipids to analyse samples sent from America to Australia.
“With the new technology that we have, we can now measure 650 lipid species and start to see many are also associated with cardiovascular outcomes, like a heart attack or stroke,” Prof Meikle said.
They want to better understand how lipid pathways contribute to heart disease.
“If we can identify the path- ways and the enzymes controlling them, then we have the potential to intervene with new therapeutic strategies,” Prof Meikle said.
“In the same way that statins target cholesterol by interfering with one of the enzymes that synthesises it.”
The new $1.3 million grant over four years from the National Institutes of Health in the US will also allow them to look at the genes of the families involved in the study to uncover genetic links to heart disease.
Their research has already led to the development of one new heart disease blood test that is currently in trials, but the team believes it could be expanded to find other markers.
“Heart disease is still the number one cause of death in Australia and many developed countries,” Prof Meikle said.
“Progress has been made but there is still a lot of work to do to reduce people’s risk and treat those who already have it.”