In a new study, researchers found that a DNA test called a polygenic risk score, or PRS may help predict a person’s risk of heart disease.
The DNA test looks at many variations in DNA that influence disease.
The research was conducted by a team from the University of Montreal in Canada.
Previous research has shown that use of polygenic risk scores could help doctors know more about the heart disease risk in patients.
Recently studies have successfully applied them to a pool of people of European ancestry.
In the current study, the team looked at 3,639 French Canadian adults with heart disease and 7,382 adults without heart disease.
They found that the scores can identify 6% to 7% of people at high risk for cardiac disease.
The team says that the PRS is like having a snapshot of the whole genetic variation found in one’s DNA” and can powerfully predict disease risk.
It enables early detection. This could mean an early start to simple, effective treatment such as statins, aspirin or other drugs to treat heart disease.
But the team also mentions the scores may not do a good job of predicting new heart attacks in people who had already had one.
In the future, the team may do large clinical studies to determine whether treating people based on risk scores improves their heart health.
It is also important to determine how to combine the scores with major risk factors, such as blood pressure, diabetes, and cholesterol levels.
Future work also needs to extend the current findings to non-European ancestry populations.
The lead author of the study is Guillaume Lettre, an associate professor at the Montreal Heart Institute and Université de Montréal in Canada.
The study is published in the American Heart Association’s journal Circulation: Genomic and Precision Medicine.
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