Heart disease health centre

Have you inherited heart disease from Dad?

9th February 2012 - Research led by the University of Leicester may have found why more men than women get heart disease: defects in the male-only Y chromosome that get passed from father to son.

The NHS says coronary heart disease is the UK's biggest killer, leading to the deaths of around one in five men and one in seven women.

The British Heart Foundation helped fund the research, and says it could lead to new tests to assess a man's heart risk and possibly new treatments.

The study

An international team of researchers analysed DNA from 3,233 men in the UK who were not related for their study, which is published in The Lancet.

They focused on 11 regions on the Y chromosome which help determine a person’s ancestry. Genetics researchers have found people with shared ancestry belong to the same haplogroup. There are thought to be about 30 haplogroups around the world.

Of nine haplogroups identified, R1b1b2 and I accounted for around 90% of the Y chromosome variants in British men.

Men who developed heart disease were more likely to belong to haplogroup I - shared by 15% to 20% of British males.

Membership of haplogroup I raised a man’s heart attack risk by about 50% compared to men of different backgrounds.

The risk remained even after researchers took into account traditional warning signs of heart disease, such as high blood pressure, cholesterol, smoking, diabetes and obesity.

Y chromosome

Previous studies have suggested that the Y chromosome, which carries relatively few genes, has little to do with inheritance, apart from carrying male sex characteristics.

The discovery was made by Lisa Bloomer, a third-year PhD student in the department of cardiovascular sciences at the University of Leicester. "It gives a completely new role for the Y chromosome," she tells us. "It changes a lot of how we see genetics and the sex chromosomes and how important they are."

This family tree characteristic is less common in southern European countries like Spain and Italy, and becomes more common the further north you go.

"You see kind of a gradient in Europe between the North and the South," Lisa Bloomer says. "Many more people in the North have this group than in [the] South, and you have many more people getting coronary artery disease in the North of Europe than in the South."

The researchers also looked at whether the activity of certain blood cells was different between ancestral groups. They found that genes related to the development of atherosclerosis - narrowing of the arteries - were more active in men who belonged to haplogroup I.

Reaction

In a statement, Dr Hélène Wilson, research advisor at the British Heart Foundation says: "One of the fascinating things about the study is that it might provide a partial explanation why Northwestern European men have more heart attacks than their counterparts in other parts of the world."

The study doesn't mean all heart disease is inherited, the charity stresses.

"Lifestyle choices such as poor diet and smoking are major causes, but inherited factors carried in DNA are also part of the picture. The next step is to identify specifically which genes are responsible and how they might increase heart attack risk," Dr Wilson says.

"This discovery could help lead to new treatments for heart disease in men, or tests that could tell men if they are at particularly high risk of a heart attack."