Genetic Research Against Heart Diseases

Genetics advances have had a big impact on cancer treatment and heart-disease specialists are hoping to use similar developments to better predict and prevent heart attack or stroke, Newsmax Health reports.

For example, only about half of the 75 million Americans with high blood pressure can control it with medication. But researchers hope genetic and other information might enable doctors to identify subgroups of hypertension that respond to specific treatments and target patients with an appropriate therapy.

Also collaborating on the genetics project are researchers involved with the 65-year-old Framingham Heart Study, which has linked heart disease to such factors as smoking, high blood pressure, and high cholesterol.

Exactly how the collaboration, announced last week, will proceed hasn't been decided, but leaders of the effort have discussed doing genetics analysis of the more than one million blood and other biological samples gathered during checkups of Framingham study participants going back more than a half century.