Gene mutations
(Don't) Be Still My Beating Heart
22/11/10 18:56 Filed in: GenomeWeb Daily Scan
Jonathan Seidman at Harvard Medical School made a case for the importance of studying rare genetic variants that cause cardiomyopathy, while there are several common variants, there are multiple rare variants that can significantly increase a patient's chances of suffering from the disease. S. Pelech comments that while the rates of heart disease and stroke in North America and Europe have temporarily declined, the future is much bleaker for the younger generation with more than a 5-fold in child obesity in the last 25 years. Although the study of genetic mutations in families with documented histories of diseases has proven to be very insightful and worthy of continuation, the identification of SNP variants in the general population that are linked to predisposed risks for these and other diseases of aging by random genome wide sequencing will be immensely more challenging. Read More...