New research from Denmark, published in the Journal of the American College of Cardiology, gives further support to the long held notion that having a family member die from heart disease at a young age increases an individual s own risk of a similar condition.
Researchers at the Statens Serum Institute in Copenhagen analyzed data on nearly four million Danish citizens born after 1949. After about thirty years of follow-up, the findings showed that people with a first degree relative a parent, sibling or child who died of heart problems before the age of 60 were about twice as likely to be diagnosed with coronary heart disease (CHD) before their fiftieth birthday. And the effect was not isolated to just immediate family the risk of CHD increased by about 43 percent if a second-degree relative, such as a grandparent or a half-sibling, died prematurely of heart disease too. Further, if people had two or more first-degree relatives who died before the age of 60, their risk of early heart disease increased five-fold.
How can one make productive use of this information? Well though it is impossible to change your genome, there are some steps that individuals with a strong family history of heart disease can still take to mitigate their risk. First, it is important to learn and to communicate your family history to your physician because unfortunately, doctors don t always ask these questions during a routine visit," says ACSH s Dr. Gilbert Ross, and it s easy for them to commonly overlook this issue. In addition, adjusting certain lifestyle factors, such as not smoking, maintaining a healthy diet, exercising, and regularly checking your cholesterol and blood pressure, are all effective ways to lower your risk of heart disease as well.