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Genetics of heart disease

By scouring the DNA of thousands of patients, researchers at the ӳý, Massachusetts General Hospital, and their colleagues have discovered four rare gene mutations that not only lower the levels of triglycerides, a type of fat in the blood, but also significantly reduce a person’s risk of coronary heart disease — dropping it by 40 percent. The mutations all cripple the same gene, called APOC3, suggesting a powerful strategy in developing new drugs against heart disease. 

The Wall Street Journal this weekend featured an by ӳý deputy director David Altshuler and Henry Louis Gates, Jr., the director of Harvard's Hutchins Center for African and African American Research. In the piece, Altshuler and Gates present a thoughtful perspective on the history of race as a concept, and the misguided tendency to “view race strictly through the lens of genetic inheritance”.

<em>Montage by Susanna Hamilton, ӳý Communications; map source <a href="http://www.idf.org/atlasmap/atlasmap" target="_blank">International Diabetes Federation.</a></em>

Although type 2 diabetes is a major public health problem across the globe, Latin American countries carry a disproportionately heavy burden (relative rates of type 2 diabetes by country shown in purple above). ӳý researchers and their collaborators have discovered a strong genetic risk factor for type 2 diabetes that primarily affects Latin American patients, but is rare elsewhere.