Investigator: Panos Deloukas
Institution: Queen Mary University of London
Please provide information on the aims of the proposed research including the research question(s) that you are aiming to answer and the health condition(s) under investigation
Heart attack is a leading cause of death and disability worldwide, and a person’s risk of having a heart attack is affected by their genes. People of South Asian heritage are known to have a higher risk of heart attack compared to those of European heritage, but most large-scale genetic studies have focused on people of European heritage.
This research aims to find which genes are involved in increasing or decreasing an individual’s risk of a cardiovascular health problem like heart attack or high blood pressure. Researchers will also look at the similarities and differences between the genetic causes of cardiovascular disease in people of different backgrounds, and try to improve existing techniques for predicting a person’s risk of disease.
How will your research improve health?
Understanding how a person’s genes affect their chance of having cardiovascular health problems will help doctors predict who is most at risk, and support efforts to prevent disease at an earlier age.
Please give a non-technical description of how the research will be undertaken
We will combine genetic information from Genes & Health volunteers with information about health traits like heart disease, cholesterol levels, and blood pressure. This will show us which genes are involved in changing a person’s risk of having a health problem like a heart attack or high blood pressure.
We will test existing techniques which use genetic information to predict peoples’ risk of high blood pressure, that were developed in Europeans, to see how well they predict the blood pressure of Genes & Health volunteers. We will then try to improve the performance of these techniques by including other information, such as cholesterol levels.
We will combine the information from Genes & Health Volunteers with information from other studies in South Asian people. We will use these combined data to look at genes that have already been linked to heart attacks to find out whether there are any differences in how those genes affect health between people of South Asian and European heritage. We will also look for any new genes associated with these health traits.
How does your research meet the other purposes of ELGH?
The study’s research outputs will engage Genes & Health with other international efforts studying the genetics of cardiovascular traits.
