Welcome to Cardiovascular Genetics!

Welcome to the inaugural post of the Cardiovascular genetics blog. So what is cardiovascular genetics? why am I blogging about it? and what can you get out of it? All fair questions.

As you probably know heart disease is the number one cause of mortality and morbidity in the US and has been for the last 50 years. This has led to an incredible amount of health care dollars ($448 billion in 2008 in the $US) in order to stem the tide of mortality and better address this problem. However, despite these efforts we still are faced with the incredible complexity surrounding heart disease. A good portion of the risk of heart disease is heritable, meaning that if you have relatives that have heart disease you may be at risk itself. Cardiovascular diseases are also plastic, so your environment, diet, and behavior can contribute to the risk for developing heart disease. This provides an amazing array of confusion and often frustration in patients when trying to interpret what their physician may be telling them. The application of genetics to understanding heart disease is still relatively new but is fast becoming an important aspect of understanding disease.

I have Ph.D. in anthropological genetics and have a long standing interest in understanding how genetics are related to heart disease and which genes in the human genome impact heart disease. So I've started this blog to really keep up with the current literature, digest it, and interpret it a meaningful way that I may or may not be able to pass on to you as reader. Often times the available scientific literature is written in ways that it takes a Ph.D. to get through the language. Hopefully. I will be able to translate it into a more palatable format.