New Genetic Links to Heart Disease Risk Factors

Scientists have uncovered 17 rare genetic variations that are associated with the risk factors for diabetes and heart disease as well as possible ways to find genetic reason for many other diseases. The discovery by researchers from the Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute of England,helps to show links between specify genetic variations and diseases. These scientists studied 36,000 healthy people of European background to find the genetic links to diseases some of the characteristics they were looking for were raised cholesterol levels hemoglobin in the blood.

Thanks to two prior projects (The UK10K project and the 1000genome project) the research team had  the whole genome sequences that they needed. From the data a imputation panel was created which is open to the scientific community to get as much data as possible.Through these sequences and the imputation panel they were able to look for specific risk factors. They looked for less frequent variations that individually told of a greater genetic risk to these diseases. the techniques they used to identify these 17 new variations are set to help the next researchers to make discoveries on what causes these diseases and what are new methods of treating them. The most important part of this study is the methods of gaining their information which will help so much with finding genetic reasoning for rare as well as not so rare diseases. Finding these reasons gives a much better idea of how to prevent and treat some of these awful disorders.