Is heart disease genetic?
Heart disease, as is true for many diseases, is in some ways genetically determined. So we're all born with predispositions to one disease or another. We're more likely, for example to have high blood pressure, or diabetes, or high cholesterol. Things do run in families, and heart disease clearly runs in families as well. That doesn't mean that everyone in a family that has heart disease, will have heart disease, because genes express themselves differently in each individual. But, it does mean that if you're in a family that has heart disease, particularly if that heart disease is seen early, that is if heart disease is seen at an age less than fifty-five in men or less than sixty-five in women, then you do have to be concerned about that genetic predisposition to heart disease, and you do want to do everything you can to reduce all the modifiable heart disease risk factors. Change all the things that you can change, to do the best you can to protect yourself from heart disease. Fortunately, there's a great deal more that we can do for people who have a family history of heart disease than we used to be able to. So even if someone in your family has had heart disease, our ability to prevent heart disease, and to treat heart disease if it occurs, have tremendously advanced over the years. So that we can do much better for people with heart disease now then we could in the past.
