Heart risk tests from birth
A SIMPLE £40 test could tell from birth who is most likely to develop heart disease and lead to statins being offered at an ever younger age.
Research found the one-off gene test was able to identify those at greatest risk of going on to suffer the condition that leads to heart attacks and strokes.
Experts said the tests were cheap enough to allow population-wide screening of children.
Those who scored worst could be monitored and offered statins as a teenager if lifestyle improvements were not enough to cut risk, they said.
The Cambridge University study tested a scoring system called the Genomic Risk Score (GRS) on DNA from nearly half a million people aged between 40 and 69, including more than 22,000 with heart disease. The study found those with scores in the top 20 per cent were four times as likely to develop the disease as those with scores in the bottom 20 per cent.
The test was better at predicting a person’s risk of developing heart
disease than any single classic indicator such as high cholesterol or blood pressure.
Senior author Sir Nilesh Samani, professor of cardiology at the University of Leicester and medical director of the British Heart Foundation, which part-funded the study, said: “At the moment we assess people for their risk of coronary heart disease in their 40s through NHS checks. But we know this is imprecise, and also that coronary heart disease starts much earlier, several decades before symptoms develop.
“Therefore if we are going to do true prevention, we need to identify those at increased risk much earlier.”
He hoped to see routine use of the tests by the NHS recommended within a decade, with screening carried out on children and statins offered to teenagers and those in their 20s, if lifestyle improvements did not cut their risk.
“If you wait until people are in their 40s or 50s you are wasting an opportunity. It is much better to be able to take action in your teens or early 20s.”
Prof Samani cautioned: “I’m not sure I would want to see a five-year-old being told they were at greater risk.”
The test could be used at any age because DNA sequences are generally fixed from birth.
The findings, reported in the Journal of the American College of Cardiology, showed that men who were healthy by NHS standards but had a high test score were as likely to develop heart disease as those with a low score and two conventional risk factors.
Dr Michael Inouye, lead researcher from the Baker Heart and Diabetes Institute and Cambridge University, said: “While genetics is not destiny for coronary heart disease, advances in genomic prediction have brought the long history of heart disease risk-screening to a critical juncture, where we may now be able to predict, plan for and possibly avoid a disease with substantial morbidity and mortality.”