In a breakthrough discovery, scientists claim that they have successfully identified five genes that cause pulmonary arterial hypertension, a life-threatening condition which affects the arteries in the heart and the lungs.
Pulmonary arterial hypertension can only be cured by a transplant of the affected area and 50% of the patients usually die within five years of diagnosis.
Researchers say that this latest development could now help diagnose the disease in it’s early stages and pave way for better treatment options. It has brought much hope to the medical community worldwide as not much was known about what exactly caused this condition.
The research was published in the journal Nature Communications.
As per WHO, pulmonary arterial hypertension causes high blood pressure in the arteries from the heart leading to the lungs.
It usually affects people with prior heart or lung conditions, but in a fifth of the patients, there is no known cause.
Doctors usually suggest patients to go for a lung and/or heart transplant but in most cases, the body ends up rejecting the transplanted organs, specifically the lungs.
For the study, scientists studied the genomes (an organism’s entire set of DNA) of more than 1,000 patients who were diagnosed with pulmonary arterial hypertension.
Researchers found that these genes prevented the body from producing the necessary proteins for the normal functioning and regulation of the body’s tissues in patients with pulmonary arterial hypertension.
In an interview to BBC News, Nick Morell, a professor at the British Heart Foundation and the lead author of the paper, said:
The study was part of the 1,00,000 Genomes Project - an initiative for understanding the genetics of cancer and other rare diseases.
(With inputs from BBC.)
(For more news on Heart, follow FIT.)
(At The Quint, we are answerable only to our audience. Play an active role in shaping our journalism by becoming a member. Because the truth is worth it.)