Bad genes are a problem that you can live with
John Fixx works out every day. Most days he runs, either outside or on a treadmill. Sometimes he uses an elliptical machine. He also lifts weights and follows a low-fat diet. He has never smoked. At 56, mindful of his family history, he already has lived longer than his father and grandfather, who both died young of heart attacks. His three siblings also practice healthy habits.
“We can’t control the DNA we are given,” says Fixx, who heads the Country School in Madison, Conn. “But we can control what we put into our bodies, and whether we exercise, get enough sleep and manage stress.”
If Fixx’s name sounds familiar, there’s a reason. His father, Jim Fixx, wrote “The Complete Book of Running,” a 1977 best seller that helped fuel the running craze. John was 23 in 1984, just out of college, when his father died of a heart attack at 52 while out on a run. Jim Fixx had taken up running in midlife, lost weight and quit smoking, but apparently it was too late to outrun his family history: his father, Calvin Fixx, suffered his first heart attack at 36, then had a second one seven years later that killed him.
Heart attack risk increases for all men after age 45, but it is more worrisome for people whose fathers are diagnosed with heart disease before 55, according to the National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute (NHLBI).
Many cardiovascular experts agree that a family history of early heart disease is a warning, not an automatic death sentence, and vulnerable people can lessen their risk. Such measures include quitting smoking (or never starting), eating a low-fat diet, exercising regularly and losing weight. Moreover, advances in drug therapy have made it easier to control or treat conditions that contribute to heart disease, such as hypertension, high cholesterol and diabetes.
Having bad genes “doesn’t necessarily mean you are fated to have heart disease,” says Cashell Jaquish, a genetic epidemiologist with the NHLBI. “Other factors, like not smoking, diet and exercise, can have a very large effect. Family history does increase your risk slightly, but not as much as (not doing) these other things.”
Heart disease is the leading cause of death in the United States for men and women, killing more than 600,000 people annually, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Every year, about 735,000 Americans have a heart attack. Of these, 525,000 are a first heart attack, and 210,000 occur in people who already have had one, CDC says. Family history is one of several risk factors, which — in addition to lifestyle behaviors and such conditions as diabetes, high cholesterol and hypertension — include, age, race and ethnicity.
Equally important, families share more than genes. They also often share the same environment, the same diet and behaviors such as smoking. This can complicate efforts to tease out the role of genetics, because many factors are probably involved.
“When large studies are conducted, results suggest about a twofold risk if you had a mother or father with coronary heart disease,” says Eric B. Rimm, director of the cardiovascular epidemiology program at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health. “The younger your parent was when (he or she) suffered the first event, the higher the risk for the child. However, this is not all genetic, since parents and children share similar lifestyle habits, so it’s tough to disentangle completely.”
Iftikhar Kullo, a cardiovascular genetics researcher at the Mayo Clinic, agrees. “If you’re dealt a bad hand by your family, it doesn’t mean you are determined to have heart disease,” he says. “You can reduce that risk . ... The first layer is lifestyle. The next layer is drug therapy. Risk is a scale that you can dial up or down.”
Recent studies suggest that there are at least 161 identified genetic variants that have been linked to heart disease, and most of us have one or more of them, according to experts. “These are variants that have modest effects,” Kullo says. “Each variant raises your risk anywhere from 5 percent to 35 percent, depending on the variant. The more you have, the higher your risk.”
Currently, genetic testing for heart disease risk takes place only as part of research. But Mayo is developing a test that may become more widely available to clinicians and their patients as early as this year, according to Kullo.
Kullo says he believes knowing your individual genetic risk profile could encourage behavior changes or a willingness to begin medication. He conducted a 2015 study comparing the use of genetic information to the current conventional method of assessing heart disease risk, the Framingham Risk Score. The study found that people with high cholesterol who knew their personal genetic data had lower “bad” cholesterol (lowdensity lipoprotein cholesterol, or LDL) after six months than those in a control group, concluding that the genetic knowledge had prompted them to start treatment.
Jaquish says she believes the biggest benefit from personal genetic information will be in pharmacogenetics, the field that studies how genes affect the way people respond to drugs. “It will help us understand the biology, and give us new drug targets,” she says. “We’ll be using genetics to predict which drugs will work and which ones won’t.”
In the meantime, experts say, the best advice for everyone, not just those with a family history, is to stop smoking, or don’t start, eat a healthy diet, exercise and, if necessary, take medication to control hypertension, diabetes, and high cholesterol.
Those lifestyle changes have so far paid off for Fixx. “Hopefully I’ll end up living longer because of the adjustments I’ve made to diet, stress management, healthy sleep, the love of a good wife, pursuing a job and career I enjoy, and maintaining a lifelong commitment to exercise,” Fixx says.