COLUMBUS, Ohio -- Researchers who were looking for the reason why simple aspirin use protects some people from developing heart attacks have traced the mechanism back to a specific genetic factor present on the surface of clotting cells called platelets.
The discovery could be used to determine which people at risk for heart attacks and heart disease might benefit mostly from daily doses of aspirin and which people might need other non-aspirin drugs to gain the same effect.
The study by Ohio State University researchers was published in the latest issue of the British medical journal The Lancet.
Earlier studies have shown that about 25 to 50 percent of a normal population can reduce their risk of a heart attack if they take daily doses of aspirin. But until now, researchers didn't understand why this beneficial effect occurred, and why aspirin's benefit was limited to such a small group of patients.
The new research suggests that aspirin may specifically target patients who display an altered gene, called the PlA2 polymorphism, which impacts upon the protective action of aspirin.
Generally speaking, genes are changed by one of two mechanisms -- mutations and polymorphisms. Mutations tend to occur in a small portion of the population and are the genetic changes most often closely linked to diseases because they alter the function of the protein product, the blueprint of which has been disrupted by the mutation.
Polymorphisms, on the other hand, are gene changes that do not grossly alter the function of the gene product but, instead, provide alternative templates for the making of certain proteins. These polymorphisms are much more common in the population and can represent improvements in the genetic makeup of species over time.
Glen Cooke, a post-doctoral researcher in the laboratory of Pascal Goldschmidt,
chief of the division of cardiology and director of t
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Contact: Pascal Goldschmidt-Clermont
Goldschmidt-1@medctr.osu.edu
(614) 688-5779
Ohio State University
25-Apr-1998