Research shows shrinking telomeres linked to heart disease

The gradual erosion of telomeres, the strands of DNA capping chromosomes that wear away with each cell division, may play a pivotal role in heart disease, and drugs called statins may limit the damage, the New Scientist reported on Friday on its website.

Researchers from Leicester and Glasgow Universities in the United Kingdom found that people who have much shorter telomeres are more likely to suffer from heart attacks.

In the five-year research, they first took blood samples from 484 middle-aged men with moderately raised cholesterol and from 1058 control subjects, and compared the telomere lengths in their white blood cells.

The researchers eventually found both patients and controls with the shortest telomeres were twice as likely to have developed serious heart disease,

They also found that statins, which are better known for their cholesterol-lowering properties, appeared to alleviate the effects of telomere damage and may even protect telomeres against degradation.

But the protective effect of statins was only seen in patients with comparatively short telomeres.

 "In patients whose telomeres were wearing away at a normal rate, statin treatment didn't make any difference. This suggests that statins were protecting against the worst cases of telomere degradation. Without statins they might have been even shorter," Leicester University cardiologist Nilesh Samani, who led the research, was quoted as saying.

For years, doctors and scientists have suspected that another property of statins, unrelated to their cholesterol-lowering ability, explained how they protected patients from heart disease and stroke so effectively.

The discoveries made by Samani's team provide important new insights into the causes of arterial disease.

Samani said exactly how statins might limit the damage caused by telomere shortening or even directly protect telomeres was " speculation at this stage," but his group has already begun laboratory studies to test how the drugs interact with telomeres.

Source from Xinhua News