February 6, 2013
February is American Heart Month and a time to focus on what remains the nation’s number one killer — heart disease — which is responsible for one in three deaths in the United States every year. Why heart disease is so deadly has a lot to do with lifestyle and diet in America. Obesity, even among [...]
April 4, 2012
A recent study in The Lancet reported that variation on the Y chromosome -- haplogroup I, tagged by the SNP rs2032597 -- is associated with coronary artery disease (CAD) in British men, with an odds ratio of 1.56. This finding stands out for several reasons. For one thing, the effect is substantially larger [...]
February 2, 2012
LDL is the “bad” cholesterol that clogs arteries and is linked to coronary heart disease. Although people can do a lot to lower LDL levels and prevent heart disease — eating healthy, exercising, and taking certain medications — it’s also likely that genetics influences the relationship between LDL [...]
January 23, 2012
By Arnab Chowdry, Senior Scientific Software Engineer at 23andMe Having been young and healthy for the majority of my life, I haven’t had many opportunities to interact with our health care system. Not too long ago I was a sedentary, slightly-overweight, South Asian man entering my thirties. I had [...]
June 30, 2009
Study after study has shown that high blood levels of C-reactive protein (CRP), a marker of inflammation, are associated with increased risk of cardiovascular disease. But what hasn't been clear is whether CRP actually causes heart disease, or just indicates the presence of artery-blocking [...]
December 15, 2008
Genome-wide association studies, the research projects that connect SNPs to different traits and conditions (and fuel much of the 23andMe Health and Traits feature), focus on fairly common genetic variations that generally have small effects on risk. But critics of this type of research charge that [...]
