Study shows that DNA is not responsible for your health destiny

A new US study has found out that clean living can reduce your risk for heart disease even if your genes are heavily stacked against you.

The study which involves more than 55,000 people from around the world found that people with the most inherited risk cut their chances of having a heart attack or other heart problems in half if they did not smoke, ate well, exercised and stayed slim.

The study also found out that the opposite is true: You can largely trash the benefit of good genes with unhealthy habits.

According to the study leader, Dr Sekar Kathiresan, genetic research chief at Massachusetts General Hospital,

"DNA is not destiny, and you have control." 

"Many people assume that if your father had a heart attack, you're destined to have a problem," but the results show that's not the case, he said.

According to popular knowledge, it's long been known that genes and lifestyle affect heart risk, but how much influence each one has, and how much one factor can offset the other, are unknown.

Researchers combined information from four global studies, including one which involved checking imagery for plaque building up in heart arteries.

Participants were checked for 50 genes related to heart risks and placed in five groups based on how many they had. They were also sorted into three groups by healthy lifestyle factors of- not being obese, exercising at least once a week, eating a healthy diet and not smoking.

The results obtained showed that: people with the most gene risk had nearly twice the chance of developing heart problems than people in the lowest gene risk group did. 

Roughly the same was true for those in the unfavorable lifestyle group versus the favorable group.
But the interesting part of the result was the difference in risk when gene and lifestyle factors were combined.

"If you have an unfavourable lifestyle and high gene risk, your risk of having a heart attack over the next 10 years is 10 per cent," but with a good lifestyle, it was only five per cent in one of the groups in the study, said Kathiresan.

The study was discussed Sunday at an American Heart Association conference in New Orleans and published online in the New England Journal of Medicine.