Liver Genes May Dictate Heart Disease Risk
A new study by has discovered that the liver could influence people’s susceptibility to obesity and cardiovascular disease.
Drawing on data from the UK Biobank with over 700 000 individuals, scientists from Brunel University London and Imperial College London found that heart disease is far more common among people with genes that previously been linked to the control of functions such as the metabolism of fat and glucose.
Published in Nature Communications, it’s hoped the research could help clinicians identify those with the greatest risk of future heart disease, possibly allowing for interventions at an earlier stage.
“We were looking at liver enzymes, which are a reflection of our liver function, to identify which genes in the human genome control liver function and what else might be associated with those genes,” explained project co-lead Dr Raha Pazoki, a lecturer in biomedical sciences at Brunel.
“One of the things we found, for instance, was that these genes are linked to obesity and the distribution of fat in the body and the percentage of fat in the liver – they are implicated in our metabolism and how our bodies process fats and glucose.”
The team used a method known as Mendelian randomisation, which makes use of large-scale genetic datasets to replicate a controlled, randomised trial. Mendelian randomisation is a research method which provides evidence on putative causal relations between modifiable risk factors and disease, using genetic variants as natural experiments. The scientists examined individuals’ genomes based on the number of hazardous liver genes they carry, then investigated how an abundance of these hazardous genes impacts an individual’s susceptibility to heart disease.
“We found that when we looked at coronary heart disease, for example, there is an abundance of disease in those who carry hazardous liver genes compared to those who don’t. We can therefore say that there is a causal link between liver function and cardiovascular disease.”
Source: Medical Xpress
Journal information: Genetic analysis in European ancestry individuals identifies 517 loci associated with liver enzymes, Nature Communications (2021). DOI: 10.1038/s41467-021-22338-2
