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Senior Citizen Health & Medicine
Stress Probed for Its Impact on Cardiovascular
Disease and Diabetes
National Institutes of Health study looks at
twins
|
Dr. Frank Treiber, MCG's vice president
for research, has been studying how environmental stress contributes to
cardiovascular disease and type 2 diabetes by following 523 pairs of
twins since 1997. Researchers have long thought that environmental
stress factors -- things like family dysfunction, low socioeconomic
status and discrimination -- play an important role in cardiovascular
disease and type 2 diabetes, but little is known about physiological
factors that link stress to the diseases' development. Medical College of Georgia |
Sept. 6, 2007 - Researchers have long thought
that environmental stress factors – things like family dysfunction, low
socioeconomic status and discrimination – play an important role in
cardiovascular disease and type II diabetes, but little is known about
physiological factors that link stress to the diseases’ development.
There is hope, however, to learn more from a study of twins at the
Medical College of Georgia.
The study, which follows 523 pairs of twins, is
funded by a $1.7 million continuation grant from the National Institutes
of Health.
“Cardiovascular disease and type II diabetes and
their co-morbidity pose an important health challenge to the United
States,” says Dr. Frank Treiber, vice president for research and
principal investigator on the study. “What we’re looking at are
environmental issues and the role they play in causing these diseases.
It’s often the combination of genetic and environmental risk factors
that is driving the development of these diseases.”
“How those factors are related to physiological
changes that then cause the development of subclinical disease is
unknown at this point,” Dr. Treiber says. “A twin study allows you to
tease out the genetic contributions by comparing identical and fraternal
twins.”
MCG researchers have been studying the twin sets
since 1997. When they started the study, their average age was 10; they
will be 19, on average, as they start the new study.
By comparing identical twins, who share the same
genetic material, to fraternal twins, who are, on average, like other
siblings in terms of the genetic material they share, researchers can
determine whether risk factors such as high blood pressure and insulin
levels are due to genetics or environmental factors.
They believe the cumulative impact of stressful
environments will predict cardiovascular disease and type II diabetes.
Researchers will evaluate them two more times
over the next four years, asking about stress factors, including their
living environments and how they cope with stress.
“The twin design allows you to assess whether
they are experiencing the same environmental factors now as when they
were younger and in the same household,” Dr. Treiber says. “Early in
life, children tend to model their parents’ behavior in how they cope
with stress and perceive the world. As they’ve gotten older, they’ve
been exposed to different things, different environments. By comparing
them and determining whether they’ve developed early signs of these
diseases, we can tell how much is attributable to genetics and how much
is environmental stress.”
Past phases of the study have revealed that among
both the black and white twins, genetics account for about half of the
differences in blood pressure and reactions to stress.
With the current phase, researchers also hope to
find out whether the black twins, whose race tends to develop
hypertension earlier and more often than whites, are more impacted by
stress. One theory is that blacks have a higher risk of stress due to
things such as discrimination, unfair treatment and unsafe
neighborhoods.
“The value of the longitudinal study is that
we’ll be able to look at the changes over time,” Dr. Treiber says. “Not
only the physical changes as they mature, but also the changes in their
social and emotional development.”
“We have a greater chance to intervene and alter
environmental factors, for example by teaching people how to better deal
with stress,” says Dr. Harold Snieder, MCG adjunct professor of
pediatrics, chair of the Genetic Epidemiology and Biostatistics Unit at
the University of Groningen, The Netherlands, and a co-investigator on
the study.
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