American genetic scientists have discovered a mutation, the carriers of which are more difficult to experience stress and die more often from heart attacks.
As you know, stress is a threat that affects the state of the cardiovascular system and causes the appearance of a whole range of other diseases. So, in one of the recent studies it was shown that stress disrupts the normal state of the body, mixing the mechanisms of the nervous and autoimmune systems and becoming, in particular, one of the causes of multiple sclerosis.
The authors of the latest study focused on heart attacks, because no genetic predisposition to heart disease has been known to date. The Duke University team, led by Professor Redford Williams, has been working on this issue for a long time. Last year, they were able to find a genetic mutation, the so-called single nucleotide polymorphism (when only one letter changes in the DNA sequence) in the serotonin receptor gene, which leads to an overreaction to stress. Scientists then stated that the blood of men with this genetic variant has twice the content of cortisol, which is called the stress hormone. This hormone is synthesized in the adrenal glands when the body is faced with a sharp change in conditions and is mobilized to fight.
Using a database compiled at Duke University of 6,000 patients, of whom 13% had the defect in their genome, the researchers found that these people were more likely to have a heart attack and 38% more likely to die from it than those who did not. of this mutation. Data on patients were collected for six years, and experts calculated the mentioned 38%, excluding dependence on age, obesity, bad habits, such as smoking and other diseases. They also found no gender differences.
In the future, this study may help identify more effective and intensive strategies to prevent cardiovascular disease https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cardiovascular_disease. However, it is not yet clear how the genetic defect discovered by scientists leads to heart problems. Now they are working on a hypothesis that when the level of cortisol in the blood increases, the level of another hormone, MMP9, increases, which makes the walls of blood vessels more prone to rupture and form blood clots, which, in turn, increases the risk of heart attack and death from it.
