By Traci Pedersen Associate News Editor Reviewed by John M. Grohol, Psy.D. on December 28, 2013

A genetic variant known to make some people hypersensitive to stress is also linked to a 38 percent increased risk of heart attack or death in patients with heart disease, according to researchers at Duke Medicine.

Weve heard a lot about personalized medicine in cancer, but in cardiovascular disease we are not nearly as far along in finding the genetic variants that identify people at higher risk, said senior author Redford B. Williams Jr., M.D., director of the Behavioral Medicine Research Center at Duke University School of Medicine.

Here we have a paradigm for the move toward personalized medicine in cardiovascular disease.

The researchers built on previous work at Duke and elsewhere that identified a variation in a DNA sequence, known as a single nucleotide polymorphism (SNP), where one letter in the genetic code is swapped for another to change the genes function. The team focused on a particular SNP that occurs on the gene that makes a serotonin receptor and causes a hyperactive reaction to stress.

In a previous study, researchers found that men with this genetic variant had twice as much cortisol in their blood when exposed to stress, compared to men without the variant.The stress hormonecortisol is produced in the adrenal gland to support the bodys biological response when reacting to a situation that causes negative emotions.

It is known that cortisol has effects on the bodys metabolism, on inflammation and various other biological functions, that could play a role in increasing the risk of cardiovascular disease, said lead author Beverly H. Brummett, Ph.D., associate professor of psychiatry and behavioral sciences at Duke.

It has been shown that high cortisol levels are predictive of increased heart disease risk. So we wanted to examine this more closely.

The exciting part to me this is that this genetic trait occurs in a significant proportion of people with heart disease, Brummett said. If we can replicate this and build on it, we may be able to find ways to reduce the cortisol reaction to stress either through behavior modification or drug therapies and reduce deaths from heart attack.

Researchers used a database to run a genetic analysis of more than 6,100 white participants, two-thirds of whom were men, and one-third women. About 13 percent of this group had the genetic variation for the overactive stress response.

Read more:
Stress Reaction Gene Tied to Heart Attacks

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