Gene testing doesn’t help predict heart disease

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Gene testing adds nothing to the prediction of heart disease over existing methods, according to a report in the American Heart Journal.

Doctors “should keep on focusing on what they are doing” and not think that DNA tests are going to change their practice anytime soon, study author Dr. A. Cecile J. W. Janssens from Erasmus MC-University Medical Center Rotterdam, The Netherlands told Reuters Health.

Janssens and colleagues found that it would take more than 100 genes to make tests useful, but that scientists have only found about 10 related to heart disease.

"For predicting heart disease on the basis of DNA alone, I am very pessimistic, simply because non-genetic risk factors play such an important role,” Dr. Janssens said, referring to environmental factors such as diet.

Still, he said, such genetic testing might become useful someday as an addition to typical diagnostic methods such as a careful history and blood tests: “Prediction models may become a bit better, but not shockingly.”

SOURCE: American Heart Journal, July 2009.

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