Attacking Heart Attacks

摘要

In his own small way, an icelandic former carpenter named asgeir Arnason has contributed to a startling turn in the medical assault on heart disease. For decades doctors and scientists obsessed over one key factor in heart attacks ― high cholesterol ― and devised drugs to treat it. But in recent years their understanding of heart disease has shifted dramatically to focus on an entirely new front: inflammation of the arteries. Arnason, age 48, helped. As early as age 22 he complained of stabbing chest pains; in 1992, at age 36, he survived a massive heart attack. He spent seven years recovering, and in that time his mother, a sister and a first cousin also had heart attacks; the cousin's was fatal. Convinced something more than high cholesterol was at work, Arnason and his father gave blood samples in 2000 to DeCode Genetics, a biotech firm that uses Iceland's isolated population to search for disease-causing genes. DeCode researchers spent four years analyzing the DNA of the Arnasons and thousands of other Icelandic heart patients, unearthing a couple of key suspects: two gene variants, previously thought to be involved in asthma, that nearly double the risk of heart attack by boosting levels of a molecule that promotes inflammation of the artery walls. On the basis of this discovery, DeCode recently began human trials of an old asthma drug that counteracts the bad genes, hoping this will slash heart attack risk. Boasts DeCode founder and Chief Kari Stefansson: "If this holds up, it could match the importance of the discovery that high cholesterol predisposes [one] to heart attacks."