Graciela Gutierrez
(713) 798-4710
Houston, TX
Knowing your risk factors is key when it comes to preventing heart attack and stroke, and now researchers at Baylor College of Medicine have found that testing a specific type of triglyceride may be a better indicator for predicting risk of cardiovascular disease and stroke compared to just traditional risk factors.
The findings, which also point to a potential new treatment target to help prevent cardiovascular disease, appear in the latest issue of the Journal of the American College of Cardiology.
Using data from the long-term, ongoing Atherosclerosis Risk in Communities (ARIC) study, designed to investigate the causes of atherosclerosis and its clinical outcomes, researchers added remnant lipoprotein cholesterol (RLP-C) and low-density lipoprotein triglycerides (LDL-TG) to the Pooled Cohort Equation, a 10-year risk prediction tool. The RLP-C levels didn’t add any extra information. However, when LDL-TG levels were added, the researchers found that the levels of LDL-TG predicted not only heart attack but also stroke.
Researchers also observed that a genetic variant of APOE, known as APOE2, was found to have the strongest association with both RLP-C and LDL-TG. It was associated with higher RLP-C but lower levels of LDL-TG.
Sequencing for ARIC was carried out at the Baylor College of Medicine Human Genome Sequencing Center.