Study finds 5m Britons more likely to suffer heart attack

MORE THAN five million Britons are three times more likely to have a heart attack, a ground-breaking study has found – as scientists say their discovery could lead to nationwide screening.

American scientists identified genetic variants in the DNA of patients that increase the risk of five common disorders using information from the UK Biobank database, the unique collection of DNA samples and medical information that is provided by more than 400,000 donors.

The results enabled the team to produce “risk scores” – showing how likely they were to develop one of the diseases. The conditions studied were coronary artery disease, atrial fibrillation – the abnormal heart rhythm disorder – Type 2 diabetes, inflammatory bowel disease and breast cancer.

Some eight per cent were found to be more than three times as likely to develop coronary artery disease based on their genetic variants – despite not always showing obvious warning symptoms.

In future, a similar approach could be used to identify at-risk patients at birth, say the researchers.

Dr Ami Khera, a cardiologist and member of the team from Massachusetts General Hospital, said: “These individuals, who are at several times the normal risk for having a heart attack, are mostly flying under the radar.”

A computer was programmed to scour more than six million locations in the complete human genetic code, or genome, of each patient, identifying many at risk with no typical symptoms.

Dr Sekar Kathiresan, lead scientist from the Broad Institute, said: “For heart attack, I foresee that each patient will be able to know their polygenic risk number, similar to the way they can know their cholesterol number.”

The research is reported in the journal Nature Genetics.